LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Coinjrif.W ^0 

UNITED STATES OE AMERICA, 




A MANUAL FOR INQUIRERS IN 
RELIGION. 



BY 

REV. JOSEPH B. STRATTON, D.D., 

PASTOR OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 
NATCHEZ, MISS. 




PHILADELPHIA: 
PRESS OF HENRY B. ASH ME AD, 
1102 and 1104 Sansom Street. 
1 8 80. 



61 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880. by 

REV. JOSEPH B. STRATI OX. B.J)., 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



1 0 



THE MEMBERS OF THE CONGREGATION OF THE 
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, AT NATCHEZ. MISS., 

NOW LIVING; 

AND TO THEIR DESCENDANTS AND SUCCESSORS WHO MAY READ THESE 
LINES, WHEN THE WRITER'S MINISTRY IS CLOSED : 
THIS SIMPLE EXPOSITION OF THE RELIGION OF THE GOSPEL 

£s aftcrttcmattb 23*iruatt& > 

IN THE EARNEST HOPE THAT, THROUGH GOD'S BLESSING. IT MAY 
LEAD SOME SOUL TO THE KNOWLEDGE AND 
EXPERIENCE OF THE 



GREAT SALVATION. 



PREFACE. 



This little manual has been prepared more 
in reference to the congregation of which the 
author is pastor, and to the community in the 
region where he resides, than to the public at 
large. He has intended it to meet a want 
which the living voice is not adequate to sup- 
ply; and he hopes by means of it to speak 
where the living voice cannot go, and to con- 
tinue speaking when the living voice shall speak 
no more. Other works in the same department 
no doubt possess far greater merit than this ; 
but the fact is obvious that they cannot be 
made to circulate in proportion to the need of 
them. And, constituted as the minds of men 
are, one witness will be listened to with atten- 
tion while another is disregarded ; and testi- 



vi 



PREFA CE. 



mony from one source will exercise an influ- 
ence while that from another will produce no 
impression. Some whom the writer wishes to 
serve will read this treatise because the writer 
wrote it, and this, perhaps, is a sufficient apol- 
ogy for publishing it. 

The aim in composing it has been to adhere 
strictly to the teachings of the Bible, and to 
depict religion as it lies as a fact in human ex- 
perience and practice, in precisely the form in 
which it is portrayed in the pattern given by 
God in his Word. Fidelity here, it is hoped, 
may gain for it such a blessing from the Holy 
Spirit as may make it the means of guiding 
some perplexed inquirer into the way of life. 

Natchez Parsonage, 
September 1, 1880. 



CONTENTS. 



Chat. I. — Reasons for Confessing Christ, 9 
II. — Necessity of Effort in Religion, 32 

III. — Source of the Knowledge of 
Religion, . . . .46 

IV. — The Connection of Christ with 
Religion, 59 

V. — Repentance as Connected with 

Religion, . . . . . 69 

VI. — Faith in Christ as Connected 

with Religion, . . . .90 

VII. — Regeneration as Connected with 

Religion, 118 

VIII. — Profession as Connected with 

Religion, 137 

IX. — Practical Counsels and Cau- 
tions in Reference to Relig- 
ion, ...... 151 



CONFESSING CHRIST. 



CHAPTER I. 

REASONS FOR CONFESSING CHRIST. 

Interpreting the phrase " Confessing Christ." 
as signifying the adopting and practicing of the 
true religion, my object in the remarks which 
immediately follow, will be to persuade men to 
become religious, by confessing Christ. Where 
the idea of religion presented in the Bible is 
taken as the proper and authentic index of it 
(as is the case generally, where the Bible is 
known), there will be found a large proportion 
of persons who in their honest moments will 
confess, "we are not religious." By this con- 
fession it is admitted, first, that there is such 
an interest or object as religion proposed to 
the consideration and acceptance of men; and 
secondly, that these persons, for some reason, 



10 



REASONS FOR 



have failed to consider and accept it. This 
failure — this lack of a personal concern in 
religion I wish to show— is both an error to be 
corrected and a fault to be abandoned. To each 
one of these individuals joining in the confes- 
sion, " we are not religious/' I wish to address 
the injunction, " you ought to be religious." 
No matter what the obligations of others of 
your species may or may not be, I make the 
affirmation to you particularly — the solitary 
reader whose eye is now upon these words — 
u you ought to be religious." And for these 
reasons : — 

I. 

You are precisely the party upon whom re- 
ligion lays its claim, and the whole weight of 
its claim. Whatever religion means or includes 
attaches to you, as directly and completely as 
though you were the only being in the universe 
besides God. And this is so, simply because 
the nature of the relation in which you stand 
to God makes it so. God is a unit, existing 
and acting wholly — that is, with all the au- 
thority and all the force which belong to him 



COXFFSSIXG CHRIST. 



11 



as God — in reference to every other being for 
whom he exists, and upon whom he acts. 
Every such being can say, " He is my God ; 
he is all that the term God means to me." And 
on the other hand, each man is a unit, a several 
and independent being. He would be himself 
wholly, if he were alone in the world. At his 
coming into the world he is distinguishable 
from all beings who have existed in the past, 
or who now exist. All that can be predicated 
of man can be predicated of him. All the 
obligations which belong to man belong to him. 
No association with his species, no merging of 
himself in the mass of his kind, can divest him 
of the wholeness of his being, or of the whole- 
ness of his responsibility. When death comes 
it is the unit who dies. There can be no com- 
panionship, no diffusion of self, in that solemn 
procedure. The isolation in which man goes 
out of the world is felt by every spectator ; 
the wholeness with which he dies is under- 
stood by the bereaved hearts of surviving 
friends. Now, between these units there lies 
a relation which brings God, in his complete- 
ness, into contact with man, in his complete- 



12 



REASONS FOR 



ness. The requisitions which God, under this 
relation, imposes upon man, rest, in all their 
entireness. upon you. the individual. The 
obligations that man is under to God, by rea- 
son of this relation, attach in all their extent 
to you. the individual. Religion is merely the 
due recognition by you of these requisitions 
and obligations. You cannot say it does not 
concern you. for you are the very being to 
whom it addresses itself. Tou cannot say it 
concerns you only remotely, or partially, for 
upon you solely, as if you were the centre, it 
rests the whole circle of its claims. The rela- 
tion between you and God places you and him 
together in an association as close, and in a 
solitude as awful, as that in which Moses stood 
when God met him amidst the rocks of Horeb, 
and covers you with a duty as direct as that 
with which he was charged. To be religious 
is to fulfill this duty ; and the burden of it will 
rest upon you as long as you and God continue 
to be what you are. There is no evading it 
while two such units are standing in such a 
relation to each other. It began with your 
being; it has run parallel with your life; it 



CONFESSING CHRIST. 



13 



will attend you in death ; it will go with you 
into eternity. Surely it is worth while for 
you to be assured that this relation is a pro- 
pitious one ! Surely it becomes you to con- 
sider the question, What is it to be religious ? 

II. 

The relation between you and God being of 
this direct and absolute sort it is evident that 
the not acknowledging of it by you must be a 
positive wrong to God. In other words, the 
absence of religion is positive irreligion. This 
alternative you adopt, as long as you decline 
or delay to adopt religion. For the absence of 
religion is practically a disowning by you of all 
the obligations which are involved in the rela- 
tion in which you stand to God. It is saying 
to him, "Thou art not my God." This is 
clearly irreligion. It is something more than 
"being nothing," or occupying a position of 
indifference. You refuse to render to God 
what is required of you by the very relation 
under which you exist. This cannot be right ; 
and what is not right is wrong. There is no 



14 



EEASOXS FOR 



middle ground between these points. You 
cannot escape the charge of being positively 
irreligious by appealing to the respectful 
phrases in which you are accustomed to speak 
of God and religion ; nor by making promises 
to yourself or others that at some future day 
you will acknowledge God and embrace re- 
ligion. These phrases and promises do not 
alter the fact, that what God requires you do 
not render ; and that thus far in your career 
you have been leading a positively irreligious 
life ; and that under cover of these phrases 
and promises you are now resolving to persist 
in leading such a life. This conclusion is one 
which you cannot contemplate with satisfac- 
tion. You are startled by the enunciation of 
it. You had persuaded yourself that though 
you were not religious you were still not irre- 
ligious. But it is apparent that you have been 
deluding yourself. While you have been cry- 
ing "peace, peace/"' to yourself, you find that 
your actual position has been one of " enmity 
with God." It is a guilty position, and you 
need to abandon it ; and to do this you must 
become religious. 



CONFESSING CHRIST. 



15 



III. 

The motive to this is heightened by the re- 
flection that the position you occupy is one in 
which you are exposed to the displeasure, or 
to what the Bible calls " the wrath/' of God. 
By that very relation under which you are 
placed to God, and which you have heretofore 
disowned, he is required, unless he would dis- 
own it too (which would be to violate truth), 
to notice and mark your defection as a wrong. 
He must discriminate between the man who 
acknowledges his obligations to him and the 
man who does not. He must distinguish, both 
in his judgment and in his conduct, the man 
who does right from the man who does wrong. 
If one is an object of his favor the other must 
be an object of his displeasure. The decisions 
in the mind of God, as to the moral character 
of human acts, must contain in them an ele- 
ment of approbation or disapprobation ; and 
these must express themselves by a corre- 
sponding method of dealing with these acts. 
To be living in irreligion, therefore, is to be 
living under the frown, the condemnation, of 



16 



REASONS FOR 



God. Painful as this doctrine is. it must be a 
truth if the doctrine of God's existence is a 
truth. Is this a condition with which vou 
ought to be content ? Is there not something 
infinitely alarming in the thought that vou are 
standing in immediate contact — and all alone 
too in your responsibility — with that God who 
is "angry with the wicked every day"? Does 
not common sense — instinct, even— say that 
you ought to fly from such a position ? You 
can do this only by becoming religious. 

IV. 

Tour need of religion, and the fault you are 
committing in neglecting it. have probably often 
been brought to your notice by the experiences 
through which you have passed in life. Criti- 
cal periods have occurred in which you have 
been forced to carry your thoughts outside of 
the present world, and to seek some thing in 
the way of aid. protection, or satisfaction which 
the present world could not furnish you. Under 
an overpowering sense of impotency you have 
involuntarily lifted the cry. 6: Lord, save ; 1 



CONFESSING CHRIST. 



17 



perish !" " 0 Lord, I am oppressed ; under- 
take for me !" At the threshold of some mo- 
mentous enterprise you have been arrested by 
the reflection, "the conditions of success here 
spread out far beyond my capacity to compre- 
hend or control them. My resources cannot 
guarantee the end I seek. There is a place 
here for the favor, the guidance, the blessing 
of God." Religious faith and hope fit into 
such exigencies, just as trust in the God of 
Israel was needed to supplement the weakness 
of David in his contest with Goliath. It is a 
serious moment, for instance, when the young 
man quits the parents' roof to embark single- 
handed in the strua^le of life. The burden 
which drives sleep from his pillow, on the night 
before his departure from his home, is some- 
thing which only the invisible hand of God can 
lift from his heart. You have, at times when 
life seemed peculiarly attractive and the future 
was arrayed in the most enchanting hues, been 
suddenly brought by sickness to the verge of 
death ; or you have seen death overtake some 
one in your circumstances. Such an anomaly 
has made life fade into an illusion. The ground 



18 



EE A SONS FOR 



which seemed so firm has opened under your 
feet. " Something more than this I need/' has 
been your solemn thought. " Something which 
shall make life independent of death — some- 
thing which shall protect these aspirings within 
me from this cruel extinction." That some- 
thing is religion. You have committed errors 
in judgment and in practice. You have had 
occasion often to charge yourself with folly ; 
and worse than this, with sin. The reviews 
which conscience has obliged you to make of 
passages in your life, have filled you with com- 
punction and remorse. The fruits of trans- 
gression have been found to be bitter; and 
under the revulsion produced by their bitter- 
ness, you have turned with loathing from your 
vicious indulgences, and have been able, only 
by a sort of violence imposed upon your mind, 
to resort to them again. Now in all these 
phenomena, with some or all of which you are 
familiar, you have the protests which your 
nature is always uttering against a life of irre- 
ligion. They show that the policy which reveals, 
at every summing up of its results, so large a 
column of pains and losses, must be radically 



COXFESSIXG CUEIST. 



19 



wrong. They are the monitors that God has 
stationed in the soul, to remind you of your 
fatal dereliction in forsaking him. They are the 
voices with which heavenly wisdom pursues 
her erring child, crying in his ears at every 
step, "All they that hate me love death !" 

V. 

To neglect or abjure religion is to set your- 
self in opposition to all that is distinctive of 
true manhood. Manhood is a term which we 
use with an excessive complacency, to distin- 
guish the species to which we belong from 
brutehood. Manhood arrayed against religion 
is simply self-degradation, or rather self-anni- 
hilation. For religion is the very inspiration 
out of which manhood is born. It keeps guard 
over the elements which compose it; it pro- 
tects them and cherishes them as the priest 
does the holy fire. To banish from the mind 
and the life the idea of God — for instance — to 
extinguish all recognition of him, and of the 
relations under which you are placed towards 
him — to divorce yourself entirely from the in- 
fluences which a faith in him must exercise 



20 



UFASOXS FOE 



over a rational nature, is to recede, by a fearful 
lapse, from manhood to brutehood. It is, in 
effect, to put yourself upon a level with the 
beasts which perish. To depreciate religion is, 
in some respects, the basest and the unmanliest 
act of which a man can be guilty. It is to be 
disloyal to that which puts the crown upon his 
nature. It is to resist the attraction which 
draws him upward to his true proportions ; and 
it is to yield to a gravitation which tends clown- 
ward to the grossness of an indefinite sensual- 
ity. It is the precise function of religion to 
make man godly, or, in his measure, godlike ; 
and when possessed in a genuine form, it 
achieves illustriously this result. Humanity 
is indebted to it for the proper conception of 
goodness and nobleness ; and there is not a 
good or noble feature in humanity which it 
does not encourage and cultivate. You cannot 
maintain the attitude of an irreligious man, 
therefore, without laying yourself open to the 
charge of being; a traitor to the manhood of 
your species, and of defaming the honor of a 
benefactor whose good name deserves to be 
held more sacred than that of a parent. 



CONFESSING CHRIST. 



21 



VI. 

It is religion alone which gives to the present 
life the properties which make it a substantial 
and valid thing. Without this, it is an aimless 
dream : it is a perpetual revolution in a circle, 
reaching no definite end. You enter the world 
a naked infant : and you go out of it as naked 
as you entered it. Has what lies between 
these points amounted to what can be pro- 
nounced, in any fair judgment, a consummation 
or success ? In ordinary cases, at least, we 
must surely answer, no. It is the plainest of 
all truths that a man s life, so far as this world 
is concerned, is never done. Whatever he has 
wrought it into or wrought out of it. there is 
something alwavs to be added to his work. If 
he gains wealth, he has acquired also an appe- 
tite for gaining it. which will force him to keep 
on gaining it. Or. if he escapes contracting 
the covetous habit, and. as he calls it. retires 
for the enjoyment of his gains, he must stand 
guard over his treasures with a vigilance which 
allows him no rest. And at last he must pass 
them over to other hands at death, with no 



REASONS FOR 



assurance that all he gained will not be squan- 
dered, and all that he achieved undone, by those 
who come after hint. Whatever is made by 
man can be unmade : and requires to be per- 
petually made over again, as it were, or it will 
become, by the mere force of decay, unmade. 
Never till life has been linked to an object out- 
side of it and above it : never, till by religion 
it has been taught to terminate upon God. and 
become a co-living and a co-working with him. 
can it promise to itself any issue which may 
be said to give it completeness. This endless 
circling around a beaten path, like the caged 
animal, without a real finality in life, can be 
avoided only by attaching life to Grod as its 
supreme end. This is done by making it the 
business of life to please him : and by giving 
the precedence in the whole scheme of life to 
the relations which bind the individual to him. 
"When you have identified yourself with God. 
you are independent of the conditions in which 
you may find yourself in the present world. 
Be they what they may. if through them you 
are securing to yourself the favor of God. 
accomplishing his will, maintaining fellowship 



CONFESSING CHRIST. 



23 



with him, your life can never be an abortion. 
It must be an ever-advancing success — a "light 
shining more and more unto the perfect day." 
For if God is yours, it is certain " all things 
are yours." 

VII. 

The apparent extinction of being which oc- 
curs at death, leaves the question open as to 
whether that extinction is limited to the life of 
the body or whether it is absolute, involving a 
literal and total end of being. The impossi- 
bility of making an affirmative answer to that 
question must always be an element of disqui- 
etude in the breast of an irreligious man. He 
may say "there is no hereafter, no judgment, 
no retribution," but he never can be entirely 
at ease under this assumption, for he knows it 
is only an assumption. The mere saying of a 
thing does not prove it. At death, you reach 
the end of a pathway which, to an extent, has 
been familiar to you. You have walked hith- 
erto in a certain measure of light. The light 
leaves you here, and your next step is a leap 
in the dark. This is what a wise man will, if 



24 



REASONS FOR 



possible, avoid. If he can get a light from 
any quarter to guide him in that leap he will 
do it. Without it he must regard death with 
serious apprehension. Hence the fear of it is 
natural to man. and has the effect to keep him 
"all his life-time in bondage." Religion pro- 
fesses to be able to give him the light he needs 
in this critical juncture. Multitudes who have 
accepted its ministry attest that it does give 
it; that it gives it. first, in the clear testimony 
it bears to the fact of a continued existence 
beyond death ; second, in the definite intelli- 
gence it conveys of a possible state of immor- 
tal blessedness, of which that existence may 
be constituted; and third, in the explicit an- 
nouncement it makes of the terms upon which 
this possible state may be made actual. The 
evidence upon which this light has been com- 
mended to the faith of men has been sufficient 
to satisfy innumerable departing souls that it is 
a true light and not an illusion. Trusting to 
it they have passed tranquilly, even triumph- 
antly, into the dark abyss. Death has been 
robbed by it of its sting, and the grave of its 
victory. Surely, the grounds upon which such 



CONFESSING CHRIST. 



25 



a confidence rests are worth considering ! Sure- 
ly, the conclusion to which they conduct us. if 
they can be rationally accepted, is such a 
sublime mastery over man's last and greatest 
enemy, that every poor trembling bondsman 
to the fear of death may well covet the com- 
fort of it. 

VIII. 

Religion solves the question what is happi- 
ness, and guides the mind in the pursuit of it. 
It offers happiness under the genuine form of 
it — that of peace. It makes it reside in cer- 
tain permanent elements, and not in frames of 
occasional excitement. It represents it as rest, 
not the exhilaration or intoxication of pleasure. 
It lays a good foundation for this state, and 
then maintains it by constant and adequate 
supports. It establishes peace within the soul 
by introducing concord among its affections and 
passions, through the regulating power of one 
imperial sentiment, love to God ; by adjusting 
it to the relations in which the individual is 
placed to God, to his fellow man. and to the 
facts of providence ; by allaying its cravings ; 

3 



26 



REASONS FOR 



by offering it all wholesome gratifications in 
the present world ; by mingling with these a 
sense of God's approbation and good will (with- 
out which there can be no true peace) ; and by 
planting within it the hope of eternal glory as 
a counterpoise to all the natural disturbances 
and disappointments to which it may be sub- 
jected. You can test this matter by an appeal 
to the experience of all really religious men. 
In no case, they will tell you, have they sacri- 
ficed any legitimate worldly good by their re- 
ligion ; they have enjoyed forms of good un- 
known to a worldly life ; and in the end they 
have died, rejoicing in the grace of God, which 
made them and has kept them religious men. 
One thing they will emphatically declare, that 
whatever cost in the way of self-denial there 
has been in a religious life, it has been infinitely 
less than the cost which the sinner pays for 
the privilege of leading an irreligious life. 



IX. 



Religion is commended to all right-minded 
persons by the fact that it converts that influ- 



CONFESSING CHRIST. 



27 



ence with which every man is charged, into a 
beneficent power in the world. You are leav- 
ing the impression of yourself, whether you 
mean it or not, upon some other being or be- 
ings ; and that impression will come more from 
what you are than from what you sat/. This 
is eminently true of persons associated under 
the domestic relations. So naturally are chil- 
dren expected to resemble their parents in 
character that, where there is any marked de- 
parture from this law, we say of the excep- 
tional party, he cannot be the child of such 
parents. A consistent religious life cannot 
fail to exert an influence. It is a light in the 
house, it is leaven in the community ; and this 
influence will be on the side of all that is good. 
You are bestowing almost all possible benefits 
in one when you succeed by your influence in 
inducing a neighbor to adopt religion. And 
equally comprehensive on the side of evil is 
the influence of an irreligious life. Somebody, 
by your malign attraction, will be drawn away 
into courses of error and sin; perhaps into 
extremes of depravity from which you your- 
self turn with disgust. You gave the erring 



28 



REASONS FOR 



soul its original direction : and under the pro- 
pulsion of your influence it has gone down to 
its depths of corruption. The remembrances 
of a useless life furnish a painful retrospect ; 
but those of a life spent in diffusing a pos- 
itively pernicious influence may fill your dying- 
hour with remorse, and will follow you with 
their torments to eternity. 

X. 

The facilities for becoming religious have 
probably been so numerous and so accessible 
in your case that nothing but a criminal and 
violent perverseness can account for your lack 
of religion. Nothing less can be said of you, 
under the circumstances, than that you belong 
to that class of persons who have refused to 
come to the light because they love the dark- 
ness rather than the light. Conceive of the 
difference, in point of religious advantages, be- 
tween you and the heathen man ; and yet 5 so 
far as the symptoms of spiritual life are con- 
cerned, you are no better than he. He is more 
gross than you, of course, in his manner of life. 



% 

CONFESSING CHRIST. 29 

or in the way in which he carries out his prin- 
ciples ; but those principles are not essentially 
different from yours. As God does not deter- 
mine for either of you the kind of life yon 
lead, you each determine this for yourselves. 
His way leads to a savage self-indulgence ; 
yours to a civilized, perhaps a refined, one. 
There is an excuse for him, as he has had no 
higher law than that of nature. You have had 
the testimony of revealed truth to enlighten 
and instruct you; you have had the history 
of the people whom God chose to he his wit- 
nesses, in the Old Testament, and the history 
of Jesus Christ, " who was the brightness of 
his glory and the express image of his person," 
in the New Testament. You have had the 
institutions of the church, with its ordinances, 
and the examples of godly men as " living 
epistles," to teach you the way of duty and of 
salvation. In the Law and in the Gospel God 
has been perpetually addressing to you his 
commands and his persuasions ; so that in the 
clay of judgment there will be the same start- 
ling contrast between your case and that of 
the heathen man as the Saviour declares there 



30 



REASONS FuR 



will be between that of Tyre and that of Ca- 
pernaum. To remain irreligious, in your cir- 
cumstances, is deliberately to choose death 
instead of life. 

XI. 

These reasons, while serving to show the 
obligation which rests upon you to embrace 
religion, go further, and require you to em- 
brace it without delav. Their force does not 
depend in any degree upon the conditions of 
any particular period of life : they cover in 
their scope all periods of life. The aged sin- 
ner, whose day of grace is visibly nearing its 
end, may be urged to seize, with a special 
earnestness, his short opportunity to embrace 
it; but he ought none the less to have em- 
braced it before. The obligation attaches to 
you as a rational being — a man. It is an inci- 
dent of your nature, not of your circumstances. 
Your neglect of it thus far has been a loss 
which you never can repair. To defer it fur- 
ther is only further to trifle with conscience, 
presume upon God, and imperil your soul. All 
irreligious living is a perversion of the gift of 



COXFESSIXG CHRIST. 



31 



life, and should never have been indulged for 
a moment. By all the responsibility which is 
involved in the possession of such a gift, you 
are enjoined to begin at once a religious life. 

" Seek ye the Lord while he may be found; 
call ye upon him while he is near." Isa. 55 : 6. 

"Wherefore do ye spend money for that which 
is not bread ? and your labor for that which 
satisfieth not ? Hearken diligently unto me, 
and eat ye that which is good, and let your 
soul delight itself in fatness." Isa. 55 : 2. 

" The Spirit and the bride say, Come. And 
let him that heareth say. Come. And let him 
that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let 
him take the water of life freely.'' Rev. 22 : 17. 

" How far may we go on in sin ? 

How long will God forbear ? 
Where does hope end. and where begin 

The confines of despair ? 
An answer from the skies is sent : 

Ye that from God depart. 
While it is called To-daj repent, 

And harden not jour heart." 



CHAPTER II. 



NECESSITY OF EFFORT IN RELIGION. 

The levity with which the confession, "I am 
not religious/' is too often made, gives way, 
sometimes, to the sobriety which admits, " I 
ought to be religious." For reasons such as I 
have stated in the previous chapter, or on other 
grounds more special and personal, the ordinary 
insensibility of men to the subject of religion 
is sufficiently disturbed to make them uneasy 
in their conscious lack of it, and to awaken in 
their hearts, at least, a vague desire to possess 
it. This latter state of mind, if properly en- 
tertained, makes the subject of it an inquirer. 
His position is like that of a person making a 
journey, who has suffered himself to be so 
beguiled by the attractions of the country 
through which he has been passing as to have 
lost sight of his object, and to have wandered 
indefinitely from the right way. He is re- 
minded of his fault by noticing the deepening 



NECESSITY OF EFFORT IN RELIGION. 



33 



shadows of the declining day, and by the 
dreariness which gathers over the scene in 
which he finds himself. He is bewildered ; 
he is alarmed. The point to which he was 
destined, and where his interests lie, must be 
reached, and reached without delay. But 
where is it? In what direction? What path' 
will surely conduct him to it ? Serious, anx- 
ious questions like these must occupy his mind. 
His effort to retrace his steps must begin in a 
process of inquiry. Could the reader whom I 
am addressing realize that in rejecting religion 
hitherto, he has been thus — and more fearfully 
— going astray, he would, with equal earnest- 
ness, pause, cast his eyes around the horizon, 
and ask the questions, What is this religion 
which I have so recklessly overlooked ? In 
what quarter, by what means, shall I find it ? 
Admitting candidly that he is not a religious 
man, and yet convinced that he ought to be 
one, the only consistent course for him to pur- 
sue is to do, in the case of religion, what he 
would clo in the case of any other object which 
he did not possess, but believed that he ought 
to possess, viz., try to acquire it. And his try- 



34 



NECESSITY OF EFFORT 



ing will commence when he begins honestly to 

inquire. 

I. 

Yon must try, therefore — I wonld impress 
the thought upon the mind of my reader — you 
must literally try to become religious, or you 
can never expect to possess religion. Your 
position will not be changed a particle by the 
mere confession of your want of it, and by 
the mere acknowledgment of the obligation 
you are under to seek it. If you stand still, 
simply revolving these truths, the night will 
go on darkening around you, and your error 
will become a fixed and a fatal one You must 
resolve to try to gain religion. The repetition 
of your sense of a need of it, without such a 
resolution, will accomplish nothing. A positive 
effort of some kind must be made. The form 
in which the desire to become religious is ex- 
pressed in Scripture (Acts 16 : 30) is, " What 
must I do to be saved ?" The necessity of doing 
something, here, is just as apparent as it is in 
the case of the man who has discovered that 
he has lost his way, and who knows that he 



IN RELIGION. 



35 



must recover it, or perish ; and the doing re- 
quired is partly done, at least, when you are 
prepared to make the inquiry, " What must I 
do in order that I may be saved ?" When 
you begin in good faith to try to answer this 
question, you are really beginning to clo the 
thing which, in the question, you ask to be in- 
structed to clo. To become religious without 
this sort of doing, would be to be made re- 
ligious without intelligence or will on your 
part. It would be to become religious as 
blindly and as mechanically as ice is dissolved 
into water by heat. There is no doctrine of 
the Bible which forbids to a man the trying to 
become religious, or denies to him ability in 
this respect. He can inquire how he is to be- 
come so, just as he can inquire how he is to find 
his way back to the road which leads to his 
home, when he has wandered from it. Rather, 
it may be said, every doctrine of the Bible 
assumes that a man will employ the powers 
which he possesses, as a rational being, in de- 
termining what it is to be religious, and what 
he must do in order to become so, precisely as 
he would in solving any other question of 



36 



NECESSITY OF EFFORT 



interest or duty which might be proposed to 
him. 

II. 

It may seem like uttering a superfluous 
proposition to affirm a thing so simple as this, 
that if a man would possess religion he must 
try to acquire it. And yet, a great many con- 
siderations go to show that difficulties of some 
kind, of a serious character, must encompass 
this process of trying. Certain it is that vast 
numbers of persons who are convinced that 
they are without religion, and that they need 
to have it. do not try to gain it. even in the 
form of inquiring seriously what it is and how 
it may be acquired. Between these convic- 
tions and the practical effort to become re- 
ligious, there is something which interposes 
itself as an obstacle so effectively that the 
transition from the one to the other is never 
made. It is the commonest thing in the world 
to find men who have lived to old age with the 
acknowledgments, "We are not religious," 
" We ought to be religious/"' on their lips, who 
still, with the natural limit of life almost in 



IN RELIGION. 



37 



sight, fail to give the slightest indication of a 
disposition to try actually to become religious. 
Surely the frequency of these cases of failure 
shows that this trying is not merely an indis- 
pensable step, but a critical one — one calling 
for attention, circumspection, and resoluteness 
of purpose. Your convictions on the subject 
of religion, however sound, will avail you noth- 
ing unless they issue in a positive and honest 
determination to enter practically upon the 
work of seeking religion. And as we have 
seen, from the very common experience of 
men, they do not easily pass over into such a 
determination, The difficulties which beset 
this movement are like those which environ 
the man who, in attempting to cross a swollen 
stream, has incautiously stepped into the quick- 
sand. The conviction that he is in danger, and 
that he ought to escape from it, if not accom- 
panied by a prompt and vigorous struggle, an 
actual trying to escape, will leave him to be- 
come more and more enveloped by the treach- 
erous element, until escape becomes an im- 
possibility. These difficulties deserve to be 
carefully looked at, and weighed, in order that 



38 



NECESSITY OF EFFORT 



the urgency of the necessity for forming an 
immediate resolution in the matter of religion 
may be appreciated. They are such as these : 

III. 

First, this trying to be religious involves in 
it a turning of what may be called the drift of 
your internal life from one channel into another. 
It is a changing of the contents of the mind ; 
or a taking into the mind of a new set of 
thoughts, motives, and affections. It is the 
unsettling of a settled order of things. And 
such a process requires an effort which is gen- 
erally inconvenient, and sometimes annoying. 
It is not easy to abandon the established and 
familiar ways in which you have been accus- 
tomed to walk, and take up a new path, and 
follow a new guide. It is not easy to become 
a different kind of man from what you have 
previously been. There seems to be a natural 
repugnance in the soul to the giving up of the 
tastes, the inclinations, the judgments, under 
which it has been wont to act. The convic- 
tion, 4 * I ought to be something which I am 



IN RELIGIOX. 



39 



not." may urge you to alter these, but the 
force of habit, and a feeling of adjustment be- 
tween yourself and them, will urge you to 
eling to them ; and nothing but a strong and 
decided resolution can enable you to break 
loose from them. You must sever, by a violent 
wrench, the cord that binds you to your pres- 
ent self, if you would become the self you 
ought to be. Then. 

Second, this change in your internal life 
must be followed by a corresponding change in 
your external life. The resolution to become 
a religious man is a resolution to act as a re- 
ligious man. This will require in many re- 
spects, probably, a reorganization of your plan 
of acting. Some things which you have done 
must be left undone. Some things which you 
have not done must be done. Duty to God. 
which you have little regarded heretofore, must 
become a supreme factor in your schemes of 
conduct. Your relations to the world, to so- 
ciety, to business and pleasure, will be modi- 
fied by it in various ways. A new class of 
occupations and studies, which may have been 
wholly neglected before — such as searching 



10 



NECESSITY OF EFFORT 



the Scriptures, worship, attending upon the 
preaching of the gospel, associating and con- 
ferring with Christian friends, and secret 
prayer — will demand your attention, as a part 
of that doing or trying which is needed in 
order to the gaining of religion. Now, in put- 
ting yourself on to this new plane of action 
there will be no little difficulty. It certainly 
cannot be done without a distinct determina- 
tion and an energetic effort. To one who has 
been a stranger to it, there will be, to say the 
least, an awkwardness about adopting it which 
will amount to a serious objection. 

Third. In the next place, these changes can 
hardly escape the notice of the public, and 
particularly of the parties with whom you are 
identified in social intimacy. And this notice 
will not always be kindly. It may be so un- 
sympathetic as to construe your assumption of 
your new character as a proof of weakness on 
your part, and as an offence to those from 
whom you differ. It may charge you with 
being a traitor to your old associations. Xow, 
it is not an easy thing to take thus a position 
of singularity in a circle with which you have 



IN RELIGION. 



41 



previously been in entire harmony ; to have 
the eyes which have always met yours with a 
cordial response look at you with an alienated 
gaze, or perhaps with a half-concealed pity or 
derision; to become a stranger in a scene 
where you have always been at home. You 
may not be literally ashamed of religion, but 
this rupture of old attachments and alliances, 
which the adoption of a religious life will re- 
quire you to make, has a painfullness in it 
which is often extreme. And the prospect of 
the trial involved in it has stifled in many a 
man the sense of need and of duty, which 
were urging him to become religious. The 
effect of it will be the same in your case, un- 
less you are prepared by a positive determina- 
tion to go forward in the face of this general 
protest, and at the cost of this personal sacri- 
fice, and make the effort to be religious. 

Fourth. The claims of the interests of the 
present life will prove another formidable diffi- 
culty in the w r ay of attending to those of re- 
ligion. They are so near, so real, so pressing, 
that when thrown into the scale against your 

convictions in regard to these latter ones they 

4 



42 



NECESSITY OF EFFORT 



will be very apt to neutralize their weight. 
The thing seen has, in many respects, the ad- 
vantage over the thing not seen, in addressing 
the mind. Nothing is more exacting than that 
hundred-handed despot called business. Noth- 
ing is more absorbing than the strife of com- 
petition, and the struggle for worldly wealth. 
The party involved in their complications is 
subject to a force like that of a rushing tor- 
rent. He knows no pause ; he has no liberty. 
The farm, the merchandise, and the avocations 
of the household, plead so loudly for the pre- 
cedence, that the rights of God, the wants of 
the soul, and the concerns of eternity, are per- 
petually thrown by them into the background. 
It seems almost like an impertinence to ask 
the panting, sweating laborer, gathering in the 
harvests which are to furnish himself and 
family with bread, to stop in the midst of his 
toil and consider the demands of religion. 
With something of indignation in his reply, he 
might say to you, " Not now, not now ! Do 
you not see that I am preoccupied ? Wait for 
a more convenient season." Certainly there is 
an entanglement here from which no man can 



IN RELIGION. 



43 



hope to extricate himself without an exercise 
of resolution which is almost desperate. 

Fifth. Once more, it must not be overlooked 
that the proposition to assume a religious life 
is never made to the mind, probably, without 
a remonstrance springing up in certain quarters 
of that mind. The fact that a man has here- 
tofore led an irreligious life is not due merely 
to circumstances. It is not a casual but a vol- 
untary result. There have been affections, 
appetites, likings, w T hich have determined his 
course in that direction. And these things are 
in him — parts of his nature — and are not to be 
eradicated in a moment, or by a word. They 
are certain depraved tastes, and vicious pro- 
pensities, which are imbedded like the roots of 
a cancer in the soul; and which, however 
harmless and specious may be their form, have 
yet shown their malignant character by always 
keeping the soul from relishing and choosing a 
religious life. They are " the strong man " in 
actual possession of the house, and they will 
always protest against the adoption of any 
regimen in the house by which they are to be 
proscribed. It is, perhaps, never granted to 



44 



NECESSITY OF EFFORT 



men, in this world, to say that their influence 
is entirely extinct. You may fancy they are 
suppressed or dislodged, but you will find them 
persistently reappearing and reasserting their 
power. Any purpose on your part, looking to 
a mode of life in which they are not to be in- 
dulged, in order to be successful must be 
strong enough to withstand their opposition. 
It must be the invader, stronger than "the 
strong man," capable of binding him and 
spoiling his goods. It must be a resolution so 
firm and uncompromising that the subject of it 
shall be prepared not only to " deny himself," 
but to "hate his own life" also, in his deter- 
mination to follow Christ. 

IV. 

It will be evident, from these considerations, 
that an important work is to be done in con- 
nection with the admitted facts that you are 
not religious, and that you ought to be re- 
ligious. You must, with all the energy you 
can throw into the effort, try to be religious. 
You must hesitate and temporize in the matter 



IN RELIGION. 



45 



no longer. You must cease to go around the 
subject of your duty in this respect, in these 
fruitless lucubrations. You must come to the 
point of a decision, and resolve, earnestly, 
solemnly, " By God's help I will, from this 
time onward, try to be religious." And one 
evidence of the sincerity with which this res- 
olution is framed will be found in the readi- 
ness with which you enter upon the inquiry, 
What is it to be a religious man ? 

" For every one that asketh receiveth ; and 
he that seeketh fincleth ; and to him that 
knocketh it shall be opened." Matt. 7 : 8. 

" Strive to enter in at the strait gate : for 
many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, 
and shall not be able." Luke 13 : 24. 

" And ye shall seek me and find me, when 
ye shall search for me with all your heart." 
Jer. 29 : 13. 



CHAPTER III. 



SOURCE OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF RELIGION. 

In saving of the lost traveller that he needs 
to regain the road that leads to his destination, 
we mean, of course, that he needs to find the 
right road. His inquiry, in its first stage, will 
concern itself with this question. A wrong 
road will only conduct him from one error into 
another. The true thing, which the word re- 
ligion expresses is what the inquirer in religion 
wants to secure ; and the way which certainly 
leads to the acquisition of it is that which he 
wants to follow. He wants to take every step 
in the confidence that he is progressing in the 
right direction, and that, when the end is at- 
tained, it will perfectly meet ail his needs and 
fulfill all his expectations. He wants to be 
assured that, as his life has been a mistake 
heretofore, it will be a mistake no longer. It 
will be my object in the present chapter to 



SOURCE OF THE KNOWLEDGE, ETC. 47 



offer such instruction to my reader on these 
points as may in some degree satisfy his wants. 

I. 

The term religion obviously denotes a def- 
inite form of life — definite in the sense that it 
can be distinguished from other forms of life 
by. elements which it possesses which they do 
not, or by elements which they possess which 
it does not. The primary feature of this form 
of life is that it aims, in all the particulars of 
character and conduct into which it develops, 
to please God. This definition of religion is 
as simple as language can make it, and yet is 
exact and complete. It will be a sufficient 
vindication of it to say that our Lord Jesus 
Christ, who certainly is a perfect exemplifica- 
tion of religion, affirms of himself and his form 
of life (John 8 : 29), "I do always those 
things that please him" — that is, Gocl. As- 
suredly any other person who could truthfully 
say the same of himself and his form of life 
would be a perfectly religious person. And it 
is just because some men cannot say this of 



48 



SOURCE OF THE 



themselves that they are called sinners ; and 
because they know that they cannot say this 
of themselves that thev are conscious that 
they are sinners. 

II. 

Now it is evident that a form of life which 
demonstrates itself by a result so special as 
this cannot be a thing so loose and vague as to 
be capable of being fitted in to every imagin- 
able pattern. It cannot include any and every 
theory and notion which men may choose to 
invent, and to which they may give the name 
religion. It is not enough, as is often as- 
sumed, to entitle a man to the character of a 
religious man to say that he holds, and even 
honestly holds, a certain set of opinions on the 
subject of religion. Before this conclusion can 
be accepted, it must be shown that these opin- 
ions correspond with something which we call 
Truth. It is a great and may prove a fatal 
fallacy for a man to conclude that his mere 
belief of a thing makes that thing true ; for 
then — every one can see— nothing would be 
true. The distinction between the true and the 



KNOWLEDGE OF RELIGION. 



49 



false would be broken down entirely. For what 
would be true to one person would not be true 
to another who held a different belief; and 
what would be true to the same person at one 
time would not be true at another, when his 
opinions had undergone a change. Truth, let 
it be remembered, does not thus change shape 
with men's changing beliefs and opinions. It 
is not made by mens beliefs and opinions ; it 
is something apart from and independent of 
them. The important question with every 
man, on all subjects, is, Are his beliefs and 
opinions in accordance with the truth ? Re- 
ligion, if it be anything worth considering by 
a rational mind, must have in it a body and a 
form of truth. Your notion or theory in regard 
to it may or may not be in accordance with 
this truth. The mere fact that you believe sa 
and so signifies nothing, proves nothing. When 
some adequate authority tells you that your 
belief is in agreement with the truth, you may 
repose upon it as safe and valid. A funda- 
mental lesson, therefore, for the inquirer to 
learn is that he is not himself authorized to 
decide what that true thing which he is seek- 



50 



SOURCE OF THE 



ins; under the name of religion is. He needs 
a guide, an arbiter, in this momentous prob- 
lem — an oracle that cannot err — to assure him 
that he is right when he commits his inter- 
ests for time and eternity to his beliefs and 
opinions. 

III. 

This guide or arbiter is not to be found in 
any fellow man. He can but give you his 
beliefs and opinions, and these are no more 
authoritative than your own. He may be 
wiser than you are ; his reasonings and spec- 
ulations may be entitled to more credit than 
yours ; but they are not infallible — they do 
not make truth — they cannot with absolute 
certainty decide for you what religion is. 

The same objection lies against the judg- 
ments of men in their associated capacities. 
Public opinion, the sentinrent of an age, cur- 
rent beliefs and notions, cannot be taken as 
indices of what is the truth of religion ; for 
communities are but multiplications of individ- 
ual men, and their theories and systems are 
but the a£o T e£ate of those of individual men. 

Co O 



KNOWLEDGE OF RELIGION. 



51 



What everybody does is not thereby proved 
to be right, nor is what everybody says or 
thinks thereby proved to be true. Infallibil- 
ity can no more be predicated of everybody 
than of anybody ; and the voice of the people 
may as easily lead you astray as the utter- 
ances of your own or your neighbor s mind. 

IV. 

Nor is it enough to say that what we call 
nature throws all the light which is needed on 
this supreme problem of religion ; for, in the 
first place, you have no assurance in nature, 
nor from any other quarter, that in the revela- 
tions of truth which are contained in nature 
you are provided with all that is needed in 
order to put you in possession of the true re- 
ligion. Certain it is that those portions of the 
race who have been left exclusively to the 
teachings of nature have uniformly failed to 
attain to such a conception of religion as would 
satisfy a truly rational mind, and in their prac- 
tice have failed still more signally to exemplify 
a form of life which, in all its particulars, could 



52 



SOURCE OF THE 



be said to please God. What intelligent in- 
quirer could be content to accept the so-called 
religious beliefs and customs which have pre- 
vailed among the purest of the heathen pop- 
ulations as the true religion ? 

Then, in the next place, it must be remem- 
bered that nature, whatever its contents may 
be. is a volume which can only speak as man 
interprets it. It is dumb or vocal as he makes 
it ; and, speaking through the human medium, 
must it not share in the objections which lie 
against that medium ? If he is untrustworthy, 
must not the reports he brings us of nature's 
oracles be received with suspicion? Man. we 
know, may be a partial, an interested, a prej- 
udiced witness as to what nature teaches : he 
may fail to notice important portions of its tes- 
timony, and he may even pervert that which 
is given him to communicate. Obviously, 
while man is thus to be the judge of the kind 
of religion which nature reveals, nothing more 
authoritative than the inferences and specula- 
tions of man can be gained from those revela- 
tions. 

These considerations prepare us for the con- 



KNOWLEDGE OF RELIGION. 



53 



elusion that, if the right conception of religion 
is that of a form of life which aims, in all its 
particulars of character and conduct, to please 
God, then God is the only person who knows 
adequately how he is to be pleased, and who 
can tell us infallibly how we are to please him. 
In other words, we need a revelation from God 
himself to teach us what religion is, and to 
acquaint us with the methods and terms by 
which it is to be possessed. 

V. 

Such a revelation the Bible professes to give 
us ; that is. it professes to be the word of God, 
and its contents bear precisely upon these 
points — the things in man with which God is 
pleased, and the manner in which these things 
are to be rendered and performed by man. 
Nobody can study the Bible with an ingenuous 
mind without finding every question he needs 
to ask on these points answered ; that is, he 
will find what he needs to know in order to be 
religious. The fact that the Bible does teach 
religion is demonstrated by another familiar 



54 



SOURCE OF THE 



fact — that the men who possess the Bible, and 
make a fair use of it, do invariably learn relig- 
ion. The tree is known by its fruits. Beyond 
all contradiction, the nations which have ap- 
plied to the Bible for their religious notions 
and customs have, as a matter of history, ex- 
hibited a form of life in which the conception 
of God is more rational, the idea of morality 
is purer, and the type of civilization is more 
advanced, than has ever been the case with 
nations who have not had access to the Bible. 
Amongst individuals, the man who completely 
exemplifies the form of life which the Bible 
enjoins — who shows us, in fact, the kind of 
person which it portrays in its ideal of man — 
will infallibly be a religious man, — and a re- 
ligious man in a truer sense and a higher degree 
than is witnessed in the case of the followers 
of any other teacher or the votaries of any 
other system of religion. Now the guide who 
invariably conducts those who commit them- 
selves to his charge to the point they desire 
to reach is trustworthy, not merely in his 
capacity as guide, but generally. Certainly it 
would be right to receive from him testimony 



KNOWLEDGE OF RELIGION. 



55 



as to the source from which he had derived 
the knowledge which he possesses. And if 
this knowledge is seen to be of a kind which 
transcends what natural genius and research 
have ever been able to discover (as is the case 
with the religion taught by the Bible) , there 
is nothing unreasonable in the testimony of 
such a guide if he should affirm that he had 
obtained his knowledge from a supernatural 
source. Somehow — it is conceded by all un- 
prejudiced judges — religion has been deposited 
in the Bible. I say religion, because the mo- 
ment the idea of religion contained in the Bible 
is presented, all other ideas bearing that name 
are seen to be so inferior to it that they are 
rejected by any sane mind as fancies and 
errors. Now, how did this knowledge get 
into the Bible ? or, in other words, where did 
the Bible come from ? Its own testimony is 
that it came from God, " who at sundry times 
and in divers manners spake in time past unto 
the fathers by the prophets," and " hath in 
these last days spoken unto us by his Son" 
(Heb. 1:1, 2). Does not this explanation 
correspond, with singular aptitude, with the 



56 



SOURCE OF TEE 



phenomenon? The fact that there is such a 
book in the world as the Bible is, of course, 
quite beyond the field of controversy. It is 
here in the world, as the sun is yonder in the 
heavens. The only point involved in contro- 
versy is, what is the Bible ? It claims to be 
a revelation of the true religion ; and as far 
as men allow themselves to come under its 
authority and sway, there is seen to be devel- 
oped in them a form of life which must be pro- 
nounced — if there be such a thing — a truly 
religious one. And doing thus — what no prod- 
uct of the merely natural intellect of man has 
ever done — shall the Bible be discredited when 
it professes to be a supernatural product — the 
word of God, given through men to men, for 
the purpose of teaching men religion ? 

VI. 

From this source and from this alone, there- 
fore, the inquirer needs to obtain his beliefs 
and his modes of practice in his endeavor to 
possess himself of the true religion. In mak- 
ing use of it he will naturally draw from each 



KNOWLEDGE OF RELIGION. 



57 



part of it the truth which that part reveals. 
And the contents of one part will be employed 
to explain the contents of another part ; for 
the voices of the Bible are many, though the 
mind they report is always one and the same — 
the mind of God. As voice follows voice, each 
adding something to what had been revealed 
before, the series will be found to be a prog- 
ress ; the field of light will become wider and 
wider, and the body of truth take on more and 
more of definiteness and fullness. And when, 
at the close of the series of voices, the speaker 
becomes the Son of God, the series evidently 
can rise no higher ; and the testimony of this 
divine voice must be the light in which the 
contents of the whole Bible are to be surveyed 
and interpreted. To the truth contained in 
the revelation of Christ, and of those whom 
Christ has commissioned and qualified to be 
his reporters, all other and previous parts of 
revelation must point, and in this, as their cli- 
max and consummation, they must terminate. 
The religion taught in the Gospel, therefore, is 
the last and complete edition of the religion 

taught in the Bible ; and the arbiter and guide 

5 



58 SOURCE OF THE KNOWLEDGE, ETC. 

to whom the inquirer is obliged to go in order 
to be assured of the truth is the Lord Jesus 
Christ, the divine Revealer, — giving us in his 
person, his teachings, and his works, the final 
form of the religion which God requires and 
with which he promises to be pleased. 

" Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, 

1 am the light of the world : he that followeth 
me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have 
the light of life." John 8 : 12. 

" For God, who commanded the light to 
shine out of darkness, hath shined in our 
hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of 
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." 

2 Cor. 4 : 6. 

" No man knoweth who the Son is but the 
Father ; and who the Father is but the Son, 
and he to whom the Son will reveal him." 
Luke 10 : 22. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE CONNECTION OF CHRIST WITH RELIGION. 

You cannot proceed far in the study of re- 
ligion, as the Gospel presents it, without dis- 
covering that the form in which it is enjoined 
upon the acceptance of men is, from some 
cause, and in some way, connected with the 
person and work of Christ. In becoming re- 
ligious you are required, not to subscribe to a 
formal system of doctrine, nor comply with a 
ritual of devotion, nor practice a schedule of 
moral duties, but to place yourself in a direct 
relation to Christ. The apostles, in preaching 
the gospel, always preach Christ. Believers, 
in receiving the gospel, are always said to re- 
ceive Christ — to know Christ. We find the 
Lord habitually using such expressions as 
these: "I am the living bread which came 
down from heaven : if any man eat of this 
bread, he shall live for ever." John 6 : 51. 
" No man cometh unto the Father, but by me." 



60 



THE CONNECTION OF 



John 14 : 6. " Come unto me 7 all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest." Matt. 11 : 28. "Abide in me, and 
I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of 
itself, except it abide in the vine ; no more can 
ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye 
are the branches. He that abideth in me, and 
I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit ; 
for without me ye can do nothing." John 15 : 
4, 5. " This is the work of God, that ye be- 
lieve on him whom he hath sent." John 6 : 29. 

Now, such language is very remarkable. It 
is peculiar to the Gospel. The founders of 
other schools of theology, or philosophy, do 
not use it. They do not so identify their sys- 
tems with themselves, or so make the vitality 
of their systems to hinge upon themselves. 
There is no parallel to the position which 
Christ occupies in the scheme of religion pro- 
pounded in the Gospel. He is the centre, he is 
the soul of that scheme ; and to be in the scheme 
a man must be able to say he is in Christ. The 
aspect which such a fact puts upon the ques- 
tion, What is religion? must be important, and 
deserves the inquirer's serious consideration. 



CHRIST WITH RELIGION, 



61 



I. 

If it be the fact, as the Gospel undeniably 
teaches, that religion in man has its foundation 
and source in a relation to Christ, then it is 
clear, first, that man cannot, naturally, or in 
himself, apart from Christ, possess religion. 
Religion cannot be an original endowment or 
attribute of man. And secondly, it is equally 
clear that it cannot be acquired by his own in- 
dependent agency. When you admit, " I am 
religious only in virtue of the fact that Christ 
has made me so," you affirm that, as nature 
made you, you are not religious ; and that there 
is no ability in yourself to make you religious. 
What Christ gives, the recipient certainly 
could not have possessed before. Otherwise, 
the gift would be a mere superfluity. What 
Christ gives, with effort and cost on his part, 
certainly could not have been acquired by the 
recipient, by the easier and simpler method of 
using his own faculties. Otherwise, the inter- 
position of Christ would be a needless, not to 
say an awkward, procedure. The whole office 
assigned to Christ in the Gospel, the whole 



62 



THE CONNECTION OF 



work ascribed to him there, imply these two 
facts : first, that men are not originally — that 
is. as nature made them — endowed with the 
attribute of religion; and second, that they 
cannot, by any ability of their own. endow 
themselves with it. If these facts are denied 
his mission becomes an enigma. He must 
have regarded men as the subjects of a need 
and a disability, such as are involved in these 
facts, or his language is stripped of all mean- 
ing, and his ministry of all value or aim. This 
is what he affirmed, and could not have affirmed 
more emphatically, when he declares (Luke 
19 : 10), " The Son of man is come to seek and 
to save that which was lost." For some rea- 
son, there must have lain in man's condition a 
defect and an impotence, in regard to religion, 
which, without the intervention of Christ, 
would have been irremediable. 



II. 

The defect and the impotence here implied 
have their realization, according to the Bible, 
in the fact of six. This is the ground of that 



CHRIST WITH RELIGIOX. 



63 



need and that distress which Christ proposes 
to relieve. In offering his services to men, he 
addresses them specifically in the character of 
sinners. "I came," he says (Luke 5 : 32), 
"not to call the righteous, but sinners to re- 
pentance." This call is repeated in all the 
expositions of the Gospel given in the writings 
of the apostles. Men are addressed univers- 
ally, in the New Testament, as sinners. Christ, 
and those who reported his testimony after 
him, found no class of persons who could be 
exempted from the charge of sin, and from the 
call to repentance. Of course, when a man 
admits that the term sinner describes his char- 
acter, he admits that he is not religious. For 
sin, as the Bible regards it, is such a contra- 
riety in man to God as makes it impossible for 
the form of life in which it resides to be pleas- 
ing to God. Hence, such a form of life cannot 
be religious. It is something to be repented of, 
to be condemned and deplored. The connection 
of Christ with religion appears, therefore, first 
in this, that he teaches men that they are des- 
titute of religion. But sin, really, is an ele- 
ment in the sinner himself. It is a depraved 



64 



THE CONNECTION OF 



disposition or habitude, an evil germ or principle 
lodged in his nature. It is the corrupt tree, 
out of which the corrupt fruit — the act of 
transgression — issues. Sin, says the Bible, is 
the offspring of "lust" (Jas. 1 : 15), and lust 
is a part of the man himself. Hence, the sin- 
ner is not only unrighteous, but he is without 
capacity to make himself righteous. He must 
be made righteous by an agent, different from 
and stronger than himself. He must be saved 
from himself, and therefore not by himself. 
Hence, the connection of Christ with religion 
appears, secondly, in this, that he teaches men 
that they cannot make themselves religious. 

Now, for this condition of want and inability, 
involved in the fact of any man's being a sin- 
ner, Christ somehow undertakes to make pro- 
vision. What the sinner needs to be, and what 
he cannot make himself, Christ, in some way, 
proposes to make him. And he does this so 
directly and thoroughly that the distinctive 
title given to him in the Bible is, the Saviour 
of men. His special function, as announced in 
Matt. 1 : 21, is, "to save his people from their 
sins/' This goes immeasurably beyond that of 



CHRIST WITH RELIGION. 



65 



a counsellor or moniter, urging men to throw 
off their apathy, and by an exertion of their 
own powers make themselves pleasing to God. 
It teaches that without an exertion of the power 
of Christ on their behalf they cannot be saved 
from sin, or made religious ; and that if they 
ever become religious the result will be due to 
the agency of Christ, and if they do not avail 
themselves of this agency they never will be- 
come religious. The connection of Christ with 
religion is therefore a vital one. 

III. 

This agency of Christ in the matter of re- 
ligion is fitly likened by himself to that which 
the physician exercises in behalf of his patient. 
"They that be whole," he says (Matt. 9 : 12), 
u need not a physician, but they that are sick." 
Neither, it may be added, do the sick tvho can 
heal themselves need a physician. The man 
who is spiritually whole — that is, truly re- 
ligious — has no need of such services as Christ 
renders. Nor has the man who, being spirit- 
ually disordered or chargeable with sin, can, by 



66 



THE CONNECTION OF 



his own skill, purge away his disorder, and 
restore himself to wholeness. If Christ's 
services are indispensable, therefore, as he 
represents them, in order to the making of any 
man truly religious, it must be because men 
naturally and universally are without religion, 
and are unable, by the exercise of their own 
power, to gain it. 

This doctrine of the necessity of a resort to, 
and a dependence upon the services of, Christ, 
in the endeavor to become religious, is one 
which is strangely overlooked — even by readers 
of the Bible. It is necessary therefore that 
I should notice it thus particularly, and enforce 
it upon the consideration of my reader. Re- 
ligion, in your case, is misapprehended so long 
as you think of it as a " becoming good," or a 
" changing your ways," or a " making a new 
departure" in your manner of life. You are 
leaving no place for Christ in the procedure. 
You are the sick man undertaking to heal him- 
self, and who needs no physician. The first 
step to be taken by the inquirer — let me em- 
phasize the declaration — towards the attain- 
ment of religion is to apprehend his need of 



CHRIST WITH RELIGION. 



67 



Christ, as the medium through whom he is to 
be made religious. This implies an apprehen- 
sion of the facts that he is a sinner — made 
such, both by the " enmity of his mind" to- 
ward God, and by the outworking of that 
enmity in practical wrong-doing ; and that he 
is unable to make himself righteous. He is 
the patient needing the physician; not the 
whole man, nor the sick man capable of mak- 
ing himself whole. Paradoxical as it may 
sound, religion, in the case of a race of sinners, 
has its beginning in the conviction and sense 
of a lack of religion. In other words, the 
initial stage of it consists in such a discovery 
of a diseased condition of the soul as leads 
the subject of it to depend upon and to seek 
the services of Christ, as the only physician 
adequate to save him. Christ is the connect- 
ing medium between the diseased soul and 
health — between the sinner and religion. In 
response to the appeal of the honest patient, 
it is his prerogative to bestow all the gifts and 
establish all the conditions which are necessary 
in order to deliver the sinner from condemna- 
tion, to reconcile him to God, and to confer 



68 THE COXNECTION OF CHRIST, ETC. 



upon him a new nature, by virtue of which he 
shall be able, in his form of life, to please Grod 
or be truly religious. 

"As many as received hini, to them gave he 
power to become the sons of God, even to 
them that believe on his name : which were 
born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, 
nor of the will of man, but of (rod." John 
1 : YL 13, 



CHAPTER V. 



REPENTANCE AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. 

Consistently with his doctrine that all men 
are sinners, we find that Christ, in revealing 
the true religion, begins his work by address- 
ing to men, without distinction, a call to 
repentance. You cannot, in fact, make, in 
sincerity, the two confessions, " I am not re- 
ligious," " I ought to be religious," without 
laying a ground for an obligation to repent; 
for you admit that your present position is one 
to be condemned, and one which ought to be 
reversed, which is equivalent to saying it is 
one which calls for repentance. The connec- 
tion of repentance with religion is shown clear- 
ly in the two forms of religion presented to 
our notice in the parable of the Pharisee and 
the . Publican (Luke 18:9). The Pharisee 
does not in his address to God say one word 
that expresses repentance. He did not know 
that he had anything to repent of. He sup- 



70 REPENTANCE AS CONNECTED 

posed he was in the most thorough sense a 
religious man. His thinking so, however, did 
not make him so. The Publican, who entered 
the temple at the same time, evinces a very 
different estimate of himself. His words, his 
attitude, his demeanor, indicate nothing but 
repentance ; and, strange to say — that is, 
strange from such a point of view as the Phar- 
isee occupied — " this man went down to his 
house justified rather than the other." The 
religion so complacently assumed by the Phar- 
isee was not accepted of God. The humility, 
the self-depreciation and contrition of the Pub- 
lican were accepted of him, as the first breath- 
ing, the first pulsation, of a religious soul. 
His repentance, his cry, " God be merciful to 
me a sinner," was the confession that hitherto 
his form of life had not been such as to please 
God, and that, as such, it no longer pleased 
himself ; in other words, it had been pervaded 
by a sinful disposition or spirit, to which it 
had been giving expression in its whole devel- 
opment. Of this sin the Publican repented, 
and on account of this he made his appeal to 
God for mercy. Now in the discovery, the 



WITH RELIGION. 



71 



sense, and the confession of this fact religion 
has its starting-point, according to the Gospel. 
That connection with Christ which is indis- 
pensable to religion commences here. The 
sick not only need a physician, but feel that 
they do. Men must awake to a conviction 
that they are not religious — that their form of 
life has not pleased God, and that they are 
therefore sinners — before they can admit any 
need of a physician, a Christ. A profound 
change of mind must take place in this re- 
spect; and this change of mind is the script- 
ural repentance. The question before us in 
this chapter is, What does it include ? 



I. 

It is an affirming by a man to himself that 
he is a sinner. What the Publican affirmed to 
God in his prayer he had first affirmed to him- 
self. What a man affirms to himself he de- 
clares to be true. He no longer denies it ; he 
no longer conceals or suppresses it; he no 
longer shuts his eyes to it. He says plainly 
and distinctly, " this thing is so." There is 



72 



REPENTANCE AS COXXECTED 



more than words in his utterance. It is an 
easy and a common thing for men to my. " We 
are sinners/'' They can say this— and often 
do say it, even when they are making their 
so-called confessions in public worship — so as 
only to say it. The true penitent not only 
says it. but savs it as a truth — understands 
and means what he says. The heart, the 
mind, the conscience, all express themselves 
in his confession. There is no formality, no 
levity, in his utterance ; no equivocation, no 
duplicity, no disposition to excuse or palliate, 
in the charge which he brings against himself. 
In perfect sincerity and in good faith he affirms 
to himself and of himself. " I am a sinner." 

II. 

It is an affirmation made with a clear and 
serious impression of its tremendous import. 
To be a sinner means more than to have com- 
mitted an occasional sinful act ; it is to have 
pursued a form of life which as a whole — as 
the sum of all its particulars of character and 
conduct — has not pleased God. Here is an 



WITH RELIGIOX. 



73 



awful revelation made to the mind. It implies 
of the party concerned, first that his form of 
life is in itself wrong, since it is at variance 
with the highest model of rectitude; and sec- 
ond, that it is the object of the disapprobation 
of the highest of all beings. The sinner, as 
such, is radically diverse from God, and is 
necessarily under the judicial condemnation of 
God. Such a condition, when intelligently 
looked at, is terrible. The soul is so consti- 
tuted that it feels that it can always, when 
under trial, make its last appeal to God; and 
it is its privilege, as often as it finds itself 
arraigned before other tribunals, to make this 
appeal. And in the exercise of this privilege a 
man conscious of innocence can suffer, if need 
be, with the heroism of martyrdom. But 
when this privilege is lost ; when it is God 
himself who proves you wrong and proclaims 
you wrong; when the Being to whom you 
ought to be able to appeal when the charge 
of wrong-being and wrong-doing is brought 
against you fails you and turns against you, 
both as witness and judge, — then the forlorn- 
ness, the bankruptcy of the soul becomes com- 

G 



74 REPENTANCE AS CONNEC ED 

plete. The penitent mind discerns this fear- 
ful predicament, and feels itself to be as truly 
without support or resource as Peter did when 
he found himself sinking in the waters of the 
Sea of Galilee. The word "lost" is the famil- 
iar one employed in the Scriptures to depict 
this state of the sinful soul ; and the soul 
sometimes, under a sense of sin, realizes all 
the fitness and force of the term. To be a 
sinner is to have "lost" God, to have forfeited 
his favor, to have fallen under his disapproba- 
tion, and to lie exposed to all the expressions 
of his disapprobation which he in his justice 
may feel constrained to inflict ; and this is the 
sense in which the Bible pronounces the sin- 
ner to be a "lost" man. No wonder the vis- 
ion of his lost estate has in some instances 
driven the subject of the conviction to parox- 
ysms of distress which have seemed to have in 
them the very tortures of the damned. Such 
extremities of anguish, in God's mercy, are 
not suffered, in ordinary experience, to over- 
take the convicted sinner. Nature, perhaps, 
could not sustain them ; and therefore it is not 
right to teach that there can be no genuine re- 



WITH RELIGION. 



75 



pentance without them. But it is still true 
that where genuine repentance exists there 
will be in the mind of the penitent, along with 
the conviction of the fact of sin, a solemn ap- 
prehension of the import of that fact, as some- 
thing involving the loss of God, and, as a con- 
sequence, the loss of the soul itself. 

III. 

Repentance, again, is such a change of mind 
in regard to sin as disposes the mind to take 
sides with God against it, and to condemn it 
as it once approved and loved it. It adjudges 
it to be as wrong as God says it is. It weighs 
it, so to speak, in his scales. It is possible 
for you to make the confession, " I am a sin- 
ner," only out of a regard to the law, which 
annexes, authoritatively, the quality of sin- 
fulness to certain of your acts, or courses of 
acts. But this is really only acknowledging 
a logical conclusion. You are affirming no 
change of mind in yourself in regard to sin, 
You clo not condemn sin, you only admit that 
you have broken the law, in so far as you have 



76 



REPENTANCE AS CONNECTED 



indulged in it. You show clearly that were 
there no law to prohibit it you would be as 
ready to indulge in sin as ever. And so the 
person who along with the confession, " I am a 
sinner/' brings forward habitually some excuse 
or palliation, with which to ward off the force 
of the confession, is proving that it is the form, 
not the substance, of sin he is confessing. He 
is not condemning sin, but trying, by special 
pleading, to show that what is supposed to be 
sin is not sin. Sin in such cases is not seen to 
be a thing which forces the subject of it to 
call for mercy at the hands of God, as the 
Publican saw it to be. Such a call can come 
only from a mind which condemns sin in the 
sense in which God condemns it. When, back 
of the letter of the law, your mind has so 
entered into the mind of God that it has 
adjudged sin to be wrong in itself, and when, 
aside from all apologetic and mollifying con- 
siderations, it has recognized sin in its absolute 
deformity and ill-desert, }^ou are prepared — you 
will be forced — to make your resort to mercy. 
If there is no mercy for you, your case is 
remediless. Repentance, therefore, is such a 



WITH RELIGIOX. 



77 



consciousness of sin as a fact, and such a 
judgment of it as a fact, which is in its nature 
wrong and ill-deserving, as constrains a man to 
feel that his only resource, in the unhappy con- 
dition in which he is involved by it, is in the 
mercy of God. 

IV. 

Very evidently, then, in the next place, 
repentance must have in it something which 
can be called a sorrow for sin. The mind 
which has undergone such changes in regard 
to sin, as we have already noted, cannot stop 
with these. It must experience another 
change : which is one from indifference, insen- 
sibility, or complacency, to disquietude, dis- 
tress, and grief. Sorrow is the pain which we 
feel over something which we wish had not 
happened or had not been done. When sin is 
seen to be such a thing sorrow will follow nat- 
urally. And the sorrow felt in such a case, if 
it be a part of genuine repentance, will be what 
the Bible 'says it ought to be : a sorrow towards 
God (2 Cor. 7 : 10). In this respect it is dis- 
tinguished from that feeling of shame which 



78 



REPENTANCE AS CONNECTED 



follows upon an act by which we find our- 
selves lowered in our own estimation, or in 
that of our neighbors ; or from that remorse 
by which we are visited when we have by 
unkindness or injustice inflicted injury upon 
a human friend. Such sorrow is not sorrow 
for sin ; for it is not a sense of sin which has 
produced it. The Bible calls it the " sorrow 
of the world." It is merely natural; growing 
out of our worldly relations, and bearing only 
upon our worldly condition ; and has in it 
nothing of the quality of religion. Sorrow for 
sin is necessarily a sorrow towards God ; for 
sin is wrong-doing towards God. It terminates 
upon him. No matter what intermediate objects 
it may touch and wound, its ultimate mark is 
God ; and he is the party ultimately and 
chiefly aggrieved by it. The sense of it is 
simply the reflection, and the painfulness of 
the reflection, that, in his form of life, the man 
has been displeasing or offending God. This 
sorrow would be as positive and as sincere, if 
it could be shown that no being in the world 
had been injured by the sin he deplores. So 
David sorrowed when he said (Ps. 51 : 4), 



WITH RELIGION. 



79 



" Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and 
done this evil in thy sight ;" meaning not that 
others had not been wronged by his evil-doing, 
but that, great as his wickedness in regard to 
them had been, in its bearing upon God it had 
been so immeasurably greater that this view 
of it overshadowed and obliterated, as it were, 
all its other aspects. The fact that sin consists 
very largely in that disposition of the soul by 
which it consents and chooses to adopt a form 
of life which is displeasing to God requires 
obviously that the sorrow with which it is 
contemplated should have respect mainly to 
God. For this disposition is a secret in the 
soul — a disaffection determining the relation 
of the soul to God — which may be known 
only to the soul and God. It may express 
itself in no wrongful acts towards the world. 
It may, indeed, be consistent with entire 
courtesy and fair-dealing towards society. 
And yet, it is sin : the leaven of corruption, 
which makes the whole form of life displeasing 
to God, and which is developing itself visibly 
in all acts of overt transgression. Repentance 
takes cognizance of this sin, and sorrows over 



80 REPENTANCE AS CONNECTED 

it ; and sorrows over it, directly and neces- 
sarily, to God. 

It may be well to add, concerning this feature 
of repentance, that while it is sorrow, genuine 
and unfeigned, — while it is represented in 
Scripture by the figure of a " broken and 
contrite heart," — it is not necessarily such a 
sorrow as expresses itself by violent outward 
demonstrations. It is not boisterous nor os- 
tentatious. It does not indulge in frantic out- 
cries, nor array itself in sackcloth, nor publish 
itself by undergoing forms of penance or sea- 
sons of fasting and mortification. It is too 
deep, too serious, to expend itself in emotional 
effervescence. It is too closely concerned 
with God to wish to report itself to man. It 
is a sorrow of the heart, and of the closet. 
It may tell itself to some sympathetic Chris- 
tian ear ; but, in the nature of it, it is a matter 
between the soul and God ; and it shrinks 
from an exhibition on a platform, or a procla- 
mation on the streets. 

And still farther, on this point, it ought to 
be noticed that the sorrow for sin which is in- 
cluded in repentance is in no way coupled with 



WITH RELIGION. 



81 



complaints against God. In its impenitent days, 
the soul may often have thought of God as a 
hard master. Its sorrow, if any it felt, was at 
the rigor of his commands — at the sharpness 
with which his will crossed its will. There is 
nothing of this impatience, this exasperation, 
now. The sorrow is not that God's law has 
been so strict, but that it has been so constantly 
violated : not that obedience to it has been 
made so irksome, but that obedience to it has 
been so uniformly withheld. God is vindicated 
— if I may use such an expression — by this 
sorrow, as when David says (Ps. 51 : 4). "that 
thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, 
and be clear when thou judges t." Hence there 
is a tenderness, a softness, in it. It shows a 
change of mind in the sense of a turning of the 
disposition of the heart to God. This is an 
awakening of the filial spirit in the soul ; the 
first quickening of a new nature : the first 
yielding of a rebellious will to the attraction of 
God. There is pain in such a sorrow : but it 
is a pain which forebodes healing and life — not 
death. 



82 REPENTANCE AS CONNECTED 



V. 

It is a mark of true repentance that it brings 
forth, practically, fruit which is meet for it, or 
which is congruous to the convictions included 
in it. Such views of sin as have already been 
indicated must be followed by an abandonment 
of it. The change of mind, designated by the 
term repentance, appears in the new vigilance 
and activity imparted to the conscience. The 
sin once tolerated and caressed will be tol- 
erated and caressed no more. Hard as the 
struggle may be, the familiar ways of iniquity 
will be given up. What was pleasure once is 
seen to be sin now, and can be pleasure no 
longer. The associations of friendship which 
are found to be lures into transgression will be 
broken asunder. Rebuke and ridicule will be 
endured rather than consent to touch, or taste, 
or handle " the unclean thing." Sincerity at- 
tests itself by its willingness to count and bear 
the cost of consistency. There is no repent- 
ance without sincerity ; and sincerity in repent- 
ance means the cutting off the right hand, and 
the plucking out the right eye, where these 
cause us to offend. 



WITH RELIGION. 



It is not meant that this amendment will or 
can be made completely at once. The power 
of habit cannot be extinguished at a blow. 
The fascination of long-cherished but illicit 
things will bang around those things, and will 
appeal to the heart once enslaved by them, as 
the tones and looks of an old friend do. But 
the sin to which these things point will reveal 
itself beyond them to the enlightened con- 
science, and strip them of their mask, and rouse 
the determination to resist them. With more 
or less success actually, and with the persistent 
effort at entire success, the penitent man will 
be found verifying the prophet's injunction 
(Isa. 55 ; 7). " Let the wicked forsake his way. 
and the unrighteous man his thoughts : and let 
him return unto the Lord, and he will have 
mercy upon him; and to our God. for he will 
abundantly pardon.*' 

VI. 

Repentance, it may be remarked once more, 
implies such a dissatisfaction with the state in 
which the subject finds himself as creates a 
desire for a change in that state. " Reconcil- 



84 



REPENTANCE AS CONNECTED 



iation with God" is the form under which the 
Bible presents the object of this desire. This 
reconciliation, it is obvious, cannot be effected 
by any change or reversal of the fact of the 
sinner's sinfulness. That fact belongs to the 
immutable past. It belongs to the existence 
of the author of it, is a part of his life, and can 
cease to be only when he ceases to be. The 
confession, " I have sinned." therefore, is a con- 
fession of impotency, so far as the power of the 
person making it, to undo the fact which he 
confesses, is concerned. St. Paul's exclama- 
tion (Rom. 7 : 24), u O wretched man that I 
am ! who shall deliver me from the body of 
this death ?" expresses this impotency in his 
own case. The sinner, with a life, a history, 
dead to God hanging to him, is tied, according 
to the apostle's terrible figure, to a corpse ; 
from which he can no more extricate himself 
than he can separate his being from itself. Nor 
does the change of mind, in regard to the fact 
of his sinfulness, entertained by him at the 
present produce any change in that fact. Re- 
pentance does not unmake sin. The penitent 
feeling of to-day only makes the history, the 



WITH RELIGION. 



85 



life, of to-clay ; and however right it may be, it 
cannot go back of the period which it covers, 
and make the wrong of yesterday right. Nor 
can the desire on the part of the sinner to have 
his sin extinguished, put God under an obliga- 
tion to extinguish it; for this would be putting 
law, and the administration of it, into the sin- 
ner's hands instead of God's. What force 
would there be in the commands of God, if the 
power to convert disobedience into obedience, 
— in other words, to make sin to cease to be 
sin, — were lodged with the sinner, and his 
mere desire to be delivered from it could oblige 
God to grant him this deliverance ? If St. 
Paul's cry could thus coerce God to relieve him 
of the burden with which he was oppressed, 
what propriety would there be in his exclama- 
tion, u 0 wretched man that I am" ? Clearly, 
then, the desire for a change of condition which 
belongs to repentance must recognize and ad- 
dress itself in the profoundest spirit of humility 
to the free and sovereign mercy of God. But 
one person can answer this desire, and that is 
God. The mere desire can lay him under no 
obligation to answer it. The prodigal (Luke 



86 



REPENTANCE AS CONNECTED 



15 : 17) can find relief nowhere except in the 
Father's house : but goes there, with the ad- 
mission. " I am not worthy to be called thy 
son." upon his lips from the start : and in this 
humble, self-depreciating frame, casts his hope 
entirely upon the mercy which he may find in 
the Father's breast. Hence it is of the essence 
of repentance to make its resort, directly and 
simply, to the mercy of God. 

VII. 

The necessity which requires the soul to do 
this does not act. however, as mere compulsion, 
driving its victim onward without giving it an 
intimation of the result. For the encourage- 
ment of the returning sinner the Bible has 
made repeated and emphatic revelations of the 
fact that there is mercy with God. Not in 
hopelessness, therefore, though in the utter 
renunciation of all personal claims, the penitent 
carries his desire for relief to the mercy of Grod. 
And does so. as a consequence, in that spirit of 
pure dependence and ingenuous trust which 
makes no terms on his part, but leaves him 



WITH RELIGION. 



87 



ready and thankful to accept any terms which 
God may choose to annex to the bestowal of 
his mercy. Like the Publican, his appeal ter- 
minates with the entreaty. " God be merciful 
to me a sinner and surrenders to God. im- 
plicitly, the right to prescribe the method and 
form in which his mercy shall be granted. 

VIII. 

One subject more deserves notice in this con- 
nection — the relation of prayer to repentance. 
We have seen (1) that religion, according to 
the Bible, which is our only infallible guide in 
the matter, begins with a conviction and ac- 
knowledgment that the inquirer is without 
religion. (2) That this conviction and ac- 
knowledgment simply mean that the inquirer 
is a sinner. — one whose form of life has not 
been pleasing to God. (3) That a state of 
sinfulness is one which involves the loss of 
God, and consequently the loss of the soul. 
(4) That repentance consists in an apprehen- 
sion of sin, and of what it involves, with the 
emotions, judgments, and desires which natur- 



88 



REPEXTAXCE AS COXXECTED 



ally flow therefrom. (5) That among these 
incidents of repentance are the changes of 
mind which appear in the condemnation of sin; 
in sorrow on account of it ; in the revolt and 
struggle of the will against it ; in the desire 

cc ^ " 

for deliverance from the condition in which it 
has placed the subject of it ; and in the resort 
to the mercy of God, as the only source of de- 
liverance from it. Now, although prayer is 
not essentially a part of repentance, it is plain 
that the use of prayer is implied in all that 
has been represented as belonging to it. The 
man who seriously is asking the question. 
What is it to be religious ? has already recog- 
nized in God such a being as can be and must 
Sprayed to. Men who deny the propriety or 
utility of prayer have no conception of religion, 
and no desire to be religious. The inquirer 
who has learned that he is a sinner, and as 
such without religion, will find himself in a 
position which makes prayer a necessity. His 
wish, " 0 that I were religious !" will take the 
form of prayer. His view of his lack of re- 
ligion will drive him to God as the onlv source 
of relief; and his sense of his guilt, unworthi- 



WITH RELIGION. 



89 



ness, and helplessness, will extort from him 
the cry, " Be merciful to me, 0 Grod !" Re- 
ligion and prayer are, therefore, inseparable 
things — as much so as life and respiration. If 
religion begins with repentance, repentance 
begins, continues, and ends with prayer. It 
needs to be impressed upon the mind of the 
inquirer in religion, therefore, as an indispens- 
able condition of success in his great effort, 
that from the outset all that he needs to know, 
to feel, and to become, he should ask for from 
God, in prayer. 

" To this man will I look, even to him that 
is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth 
at my word." Isa. 66 : 2. 

" The Lord is nigh unto all them that call 
upon him, to all that call upon him in truth," 
Ps. 145 : 18. 



CHAPTER VI 



FAITH IX CHRIST AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. 

Assuming that men are, what the Bible says 
they are. sinners, it is evident, as has been al- 
ready stated : (1) that an indispensable step in 
the way of their acquiring religion is to learn 
their lack of it; and (2) that an apprehension 
and sense of this lack will manifest itself by 
that state of mind which we call repentance. 
A genuine desire to be religions will express 
itself by repentance, as regularly as the desire 
of a starving man for life and health would 
express itself by a cry for food. And repent- 
ance, we have seen, in its last development, 
leads the sinner to apply for relief from his 
condition to the simple mercy of God. without 
presuming to question or object to any terms 
which God may choose to annex to the bestow- 
al of his mercy. 

Xow the terms upon which, according to the 
Bible. God has been pleased to offer his mercy 



FAITH IN CHRIST, ETC. 



91 



to sinful men, are comprised in the fact alluded 
to in a previous chapter, that the bestowal of 
this mercy is connected with, or made to de- 
pend upon, Christ. Throughout the Gospel 
Christ is represented as standing between the 
sinner and God, to whom the sinner needs to 
be (and if penitent desires to be) reconciled. 
And it is through him that that reconciliation is 
said to be effected. Through Christ, or on ac- 
count of Christ, or for the sake of Christ, mercy 
is said, over and over again in the Scriptures, 
to be bestowed by God upon the sinner. If, 
therefore, in repentance the object regarded 
and sought by the soul is mercy, the soul is 
taught that along with its repentance it must 
associate a dependence upon or trust in Christ 
as the medium through which mercy must be 
derived. It is upon these terms — of coupling 
the hope of reconciliation to God with Christ ; 
of finding the ground for an expectation of 
God's mercy in Christ; of acknowledging 
Christ in his office of Saviour, Redeemer, 
Peace-maker between God and man ; and of 
exercising simple confidence in, and reliance 
upon, the efficacy of this office of Christ — that 



92 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



God is pleased to offer to sinners the grace or 
favor which delivers them from their condition 
of sinfulness, and confers upon them the bless- 
ings of forgiveness and salvation. The act of 
complying with these terms is called, in the 
Bible, Faith or believing. Repentance, as we 
have seen, leads up to it, or comprehends it as 
its issue. And faith presupposes repentance, 
as repentance brings into existence the desire 
or sense of need to which faith presents 
its appropriate object. The soul, under the 
promptings of repentance, cries, " God be mer- 
ciful to me a sinner." God in the Gospel pre- 
sents Christ to the soul, and says in response 
to its cry, " Here is the depository of my 
mercy ! Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and 
thou shalt be saved" (Acts 16 : 31). Religion, 
then, which commences in that change of mind 
which consists in a turning away from sin to 
God, and an application to God for his mercy, 
is further developed in that determination of 
the mind to Christ which receives him as the 
ground upon which, and the channel through 
which, that -mercy is bestowed. The religious 
man, therefore, is not only a penitent but a 



AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. 



93 



believer in Christ. The nature of that faith, 
which constitutes the second stage of that form 
of life which the Bible denominates religion, 
will now occupy our attention. 

I. 

Obviously, the object of this faith is Christ. 
It is distinguished by its object more than by 
anything specially characterizing it as a mental 
exercise. Faith, in order to be a part of re- 
ligion, must be a faith which gives credit and 
reality to Christ. No matter what a man be- 
lieves, or depends upon under the name of 
belief, unless he believes in Christ his faith 
has no relation whatever to religion. And 
Christ is a person, an agent, an efficacious 
factor, doing something, and an indispensable 
something, for men, in the great matter of 
their reconciliation to God. He is, therefore, 
in the aspect under which faith regards him, 
something very different from a mere historical 
character. To say simply, " I believe that 
Jesus Christ lived," means nothing, so far as 
religion is concerned. To give this profession 



94 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



a religious character you must say, " I believe 
that Jesus Christ lived, and still lives, for the 
purpose of reconciling sinful men to God ; and 
as such an agent, I rely upon his agency as the 
means by which my reconciliation to God is to 
be effected." Every careful reader of the New 
Testament must have noticed that the promi- 
nent figure in it is Christ, and that the religion 
which it teaches attaches itself to and centres 
upon his person. What the disciple of Plato 
believes and confides in is the system of doc- 
trine taught by Plato. The system could be 
embraced and the benefit of it enjoyed without 
a knowledge even of the name of the author. 
He is not personally an element in it, and in 
no sense is its efficiency due to him personally. 
Faith in the man Plato is not necessary to 
make a Platonist. How different is the posi- 
tion in which Christ stands to his disciples ! 
The sum of his doctrines — the focus upon 
which they all converge* — is himself. Do you 
ask, "What is the way by which I may be led 
to the Father ? What is the truth by which I 
can be made to know the Father? What is 
the life by which I may be introduced into a 



AS COXXECTED WITH RELIGIOX. 



95 



oneness of nature with the Father ?" The 
reply comes from Christ himself : " I am the 
way, the truth, and the life." St. Paul iden- 
tifies all the elements of religion with the 
mere profession of Christ, when he says 
(1 Cor. 1 : 30) he " is made unto us wisdom, 
and righteousness, and sanctification, and re- 
demption ;" and the religion of the gospel, as 
he was accustomed to preach it, was contained 
in the one theme of " Christ crucified." It is 
in harmony with this peculiarity of the Bible 
that the faith which it requires is a faith which 
rests upon Christ, and that the religion which 
it teaches is the effect not of the didactic force 
of a body of doctrine, but of a potency which 
is derived directly from Christ. To the in- 
quirer's question, " Upon what am I to depend 
in order to be reconciled to God ?" the Bible 
answers, " only Christ." 



II. 

The faith which has Christ for its object of 
course must contemplate him in a definite char- 
acter; and that character must furnish an ad- 



96 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



equate ground for the confidence reposed in 
him. The point proposed in this great problem 
of religion, let it be remembered, is to secure 
such an interest in the mercy of God as shall 
deliver the soul from a condition of sinfulness, 
and bring it into a state of favor with God. It 
belongs to God, as we have seen, to propound 
the terms upon which his mercy shall be be- 
stowed. These terms are comprehended in the 
Bible, in the one requirement — " Believe in 
Christ." He who does this, the promise says, 
" shall be saved." Christ then must bear a 
character which furnishes an adequate ground 
for this supreme act of confidence. Faith ap- 
prehends in him this character, and sees in it 
this ground. In doing this : 

(1) It receives Christ as one who comes from 
God ; or, as that phrase means, as one who 
comes with the authority, under the appoint- 
ment, and by the mission of God. Thus Christ 
always speaks of himself as one who had been 
" sent." In his last prayer, speaking of his 
disciples, he says (John 17 : 7), "They have 
known surely that I came out from thee ; and 
they have believed that thou didst send me" 



AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. 



97 



Similarly, to the people in Capernaum, he says 
(John 6 : 38), "I came down from heaven not 
to do mine own will, but the will of him that 
sent me" 

(2) In this " sending," Christ is to be re- 
garded as co-operating himself. Hence, he 
speaks of his " coming" as familiarly as of his 
being " sent." His office w 7 as, therefore, not 
imposed upon him, but voluntarily assumed. 
He walled himself to do the work which the 
Father had given him to do. This fact marks 
a distinction between him and the prophets, 
who were " sent" from time to time by God to 
deliver his messages to his people. No pro- 
phet could have said of himself, " I came," in 
the sense in which Christ was accustomed to 
make that assertion. It would have invalid- 
ated his right to act as a prophet if he had 
claimed to act in such a voluntary capacity. 
Christ " came," therefore, by his own consent ; 
came to do the will of God, but, as the Psalm- 
ist declares (Ps. 40 : 3), came with the words, 
" I delight to do thy will, 0 my God," upon 
his lips. 

(3) Faith discerns in Christ, therefore, one 



98 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



who lived before he was "sent," — before his 
work on earth was assumed. He "came" into 
the world from the Father, that, as his agent, 
he might fulfill the conditions upon which 
mercy might be offered to sinful men. Now, 
such unity of mind, of will, of purpose and act, 
between Christ and God, requires us to admit 
the testimony of the Bible, that the pre-exist- 
ence of Christ was an eternal and a divine 
existence ; that he was essentially the Son of 
God ; and that, as such, he could say even on 
earth and in human tones, " I and my Father 
are one" (John 10 : 30). The fitness of such an 
agent, and the completeness of his endowments 
for the work assigned to him, will be recognized 
by the faith which truly believes in Christ. 

(4) This Faith will admit further, that what 
Christ " came" to do, and what he was " sent" 
to do, he was actually engaged in doing in all 
his life-work on earth. The character which 
he bore personally, as a Saviour of men, im- 
pressed itself upon everything which he did. 
His business in the world was the saving of 
the world. His aim throughout his ministry 
was to bring men to God, or to reconcile them 



AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. 



99 



to God by bringing them under the operation 
of his mercy and into the enjoyment of his 
favor. Hence, his teachings, his reproofs, his 
appeals, his warnings, his miracles, his precepts, 
and his ordinances, all bear upon this result. 
All are adapted to expose sin in men, to con- 
vince them of sin, to produce in them repent- 
ance for sin, and to excite such a sense of guilt 
and misery on account of sin, in their hearts, 
as may dispose them to seek from God the 
mercy which may deliver them. 

(5) But what is to be believed concerning 
the life of Christ must be believed equally 
concerning his death, for it is clear that his 
dying is as much included in his mediatorial 
work as his living. His own testimony re- 
peatedly affirms this. " The Son of man came" 
he says (Matt. 20 : 28), u not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister; and to give his life a 
ransom for many" And in John 10 : 15 he 
says, "I lay down my life for the sheep;" and 
to show that this sacrifice was free and volun- 
tary, he adds, " No man taketh it from me, but 
I lay it down of inyself ;" and still farther to 
show that it was included in the purpose of 



100 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



the Father in sending him, he affirms emphat- 
ically, " Therefore doth the Father love me, 
because I lay down my life, that I might take it 
again." It is impossible, therefore, to evade 
the conclusion that the character which belongs 
to Christ, as the procurer of mercy for sinful 
men, must be, somehow, expressed and verified 
in the remarkable event of his death. 

(6) The Scriptures accordingly affirm this, 
and explain the fact by such statements as 
these :— " Christ died for our sins" (1 Cor. 15 : 
3) ; " Christ also hath once suffered for sins, 
the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to 
God" (1 Pet 3 : 18); "Now, in'christ Jesus, 
ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by 
the blood of Christ" (Eph. 2 : 13) ; and "Now 
once in the end of the world hath he appeared 
to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself" 
(Heb. 9 : 26). It would seem that there could 
be but one interpretation put upon statements as 
plain as these ; but recognizing the possibility 
of an error, and in order, as it were, to pre- 
vent it, the Scriptures have supplied us with 
the key by which they are to be interpreted. 
They not only affirm that Christ's death was 



AS COXXECTED WITH RELIGION. 



101 



endured for mans salvation, but teach us in 
what sense it was endured for this purpose. 
Thus St. John (1 John 4 : 10), speaking of it, 
calls it "a propitiation for our sins." "Herein 
is love." he says, " not that we loved God, but 
that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the 
propitiation for our sins." Now a propitiation 
is that which procures favor; and, generally, 
favor after it has been forfeited. A propitia- 
tion for sins must of course be designed to 
procure the favor of God for the sinner. Or- 
dinarily, too, the word propitiation in the Bible 
involves the idea of a sacrifice of the thing 
which propitiates : as of the animals slain as 
sin offerings under the law of Moses. Christ's 
death propitiates because it was designed as a 
sacrifice to effect the reconciliation of the sin- 
ner to God. St. Paul, in Rom. 3 : 25, employs 
the same term in reference to the death of 
Christ — " whom God hath set forth to be a 
propitiation through faith in his blood." His 
idea clearly is that the blood or death of 
Christ procures the favor of God for all who, 
by faith, accept and rely upon it for that pur- 
pose. In the immediate context, v. 24, the 



102 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



same apostle uses another significant term to de- 
fine the sense in which Christ's death effects the 
sinner's salvation. — " Being justified freely." 
he writes. " by his grace, through the redemp- 
tion which is in Christ Jesus." The proper 
meaning of "redemption" is deliverance pro- 
cured by the payment of a ransom. The word 
is a common one in the New Testament, and is 
commonly used in this sense. St. Peter puts 
the meaning of it beyond all dispute when he 
says (1 Peter 1 : 18). "ye know that ye were 
not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver 
and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, 
as of a lamb without blemish and without 
spot." To be redeemed to God is to be re- 
stored to his favor ; and this is effected, accord- 
ing to the Bible, through the payment of "the 
precious blood of Christ." as a "lamb" offered 
in sacrifice. Certainly then we may conclude 
that the character under which Christ is to be 
regarded by a believing and trusting soul must 
be prominently that of a Propitiation and a 
Redeemer. 

| 7 ) Faith, looking upon it in this light, finds 
in the death of Christ a special ground of con- 



AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION 103 

fidence. For the mercy of God towards the 
sinner is seen thus : — to be, not an effusion of 
weak tenderness, not a capricious exercise of 
clemency, and not a blind and reckless indul- 
gence of benevolence at the expense of law 
and moral order (acts which would be fatal to 
the claim which God makes to an infinite re- 
spect and confidence on the part of the sub- 
jects of his government), but a deliberate, 
intelligent and consistent expression of his 
compassion and love. In entire harmony with 
the great principles of justice by which the 
sinner is condemned, and not by the reversal 
and destruction of them, he is thus seen to be 
justified by Gocl. 

The death of Christ has therefore a most 
important bearing upon the question, What is 
religion ? and must determine largely the man- 
ner in which it is to be acquired. If it be 
Christ Avho is to reconcile you to God, it must 
be borne in mind that he does this, not merely 
by living for you, but by dying for you. And 
your faith, in recognizing him as a Saviour, 
must recognize this character as pre-eminently 
verified in the fact of his death. 



104 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



III. 

This doctrine of a connection between the 
death of Christ and his character and office as 
the Saviour of men is, however, sometimes 
controverted, and even denounced, as irrational. 
It may be well, therefore, to direct the inquirer 
to the Scripture view of the necessity of 
Christ's death, and of its relation to the sal- 
vation of a sinner. 

As a sinner, as we have seen, you are thrown 
absolutely upon the mercy of God for deliver- 
ance from your condition. You are wrong; 
you wish to be made right. You are lost ; you 
wish to be saved. You can only do what the 
Publican in the parable did in the same situa- 
tion : cry " God be merciful to me a sinner." 
The meaning of this cry really is, " mercifully 
regard and treat me as no longer a sinner." 
What you desire is that God in his mercy will 
discharge you from (1) the quality, and (2) the 
liability, which attach to you as a sinner. And 
when your desire is granted, this precise thing 
is done. You are "justified," as the Publican 
was. Your sin is forgiven. The quality and 



AS CONNECTED 



WITH RELIGION 



105 



the liability which had attached to you as a 
sinner are expunged. You are accepted of 
God as one occupying the place of a righteous 
man. or of one who pleases God. All these 
results are said, in the Bible, to follow upon 
faith in Christ ; and these are what you are 
asking from the mercy of Clod. You would 
not ask them if you were personally a right- 
eous, i. a religious, man. The Pharisee, 
supposing himself to be such a man, did not 
ask them. He felt that he had no occasion to 
ask such favors from God. But you are stand- 
ing in the Publican's position — confessing that 
you are not religious, and desiring to become 
so. You therefore make your application to 
the mercy of God. Xow how shall this mercy 
make response to your application, supposing 
that God is graciously willing to entertain it ? 
We can conceive, as one method, that God 
might simply, in an arbitrary way, decree to 
grant it. He might determine to count your 
sin for nothing — to ignore it altogether as a 
thing without significance or value. But you 
can see that in doing this he would be obliter- 
ating all distinction between sin and righteous- 

8 



106 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



ness, and would be admitting to his favor the 
sinner indiscriminately with the righteous 
man. This method you cannot for a moment 
suppose that God would adopt, for it is to 
make him deny himself ; it is to make him 
say that what is displeasing to him is pleasing, 
and that to be religious and to be not religious 
are, in his estimation, the same thing. The 
Scriptures, therefore, uniformly discard this 
method of delivering men from a condition of 
sin. They represent God as so essentially 
holy that he " cannot behold evil, nor look on 
iniquity" — that is, with favor (Hab. 1 : 13). 
"Thou, art not a God that hath pleasure in 
wickedness," says David (Ps. 5:4): "neither 
shall evil dwell with thee." To Moses the 
Lord proclaimed himself (Ex. 34 : 6, 7) "the 
Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, 
and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping 
mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and 
transgression and sin, and that will by no means 
clear the guilty." Certainly, after having af- 
firmed so emphatically in his word such a 
difference between the righteous man and the 
sinner, he will not say, in his practice, that 



AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. 107 



there is no difference between them. But as 
another method by which mercy may conceiv- 
ably reach its object in the deliverance of a 
sinner, God may decree to allow some other 
party to stand in the place of the sinner, and 
to assume the obligations contracted by the 
latter to himself through his sin. In this way 
certainly sin will receive the credit and the 
notice due to it — as a fact. Full and honest 
effect will be given to it, both in its quality as 
a thing displeasing to God, and as involving in 
it a liability to such expressions of God's dis- 
pleasure as justice might ordain. Every one 
is familiar with the process in civil life by 
which the debt of one man is cancelled by the 
payment of it by another. Obligation here is 
not repudiated — it is only transferred. The 
debtor is discharged, not arbitrarily and with- 
out reason, but on a ground residing in the act 
of his surety or friend. Sinfulness in man, 
although distinguishable in many respects from 
a pecuniary debt, is still so analogous to such 
a debt that it is often designated in the Script- 
ures by that name. It puts the subject of it 
under an obligation to account to God for his 



108 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



wrong-doing. And here, as in the case of 
pecuniary indebtedness, it may occur that a 
discharge from this obligation may be based 
upon a ground residing in the act of another. 
Thus, the Bible represents God, in repeated 
cases, as showing favor to their descendants, 
for Abraham's sake, and for David's sake. 
Thus Job's friends were exonerated from the 
censure of God by reason of his intercession 
for them : "My servant Job shall pray for you," 
said God; "for him will I accept." A remark- 
able instance of the substitution of one person 
for another, in the matter of a crime, is found 
in 1 Sam. 25 : 24; where Abigail, the wife of 
Nabal, interposes to turn away the wrath of 
David from her husband. Falling at the feet 
of the enraged chieftain she says, " Upon me, 
my lord, upon me let this iniquity be." " I 
pray thee forgive the trespass of thine handmaid." 
And David's reply was, " Go up in peace to 
thine house. See, I have hearkened to thy 
voice, and have accepted thy person" The 
ground upon which the obligation of the of- 
fender was remitted here w T as found in the act 
of his substitute. Now the deliverance of a 



AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. 109 



sinner, on a ground lying in another party as- 
suming his obligations, is in accordance with 
these instances, and is a process therefore which 
has its parallel in the familiar usages of men. 
By this method sin is duly accredited (as it 
ought to be) as a fact ; but is assumed and 
borne away from the sinner by another. And 
mercy, without suspicion of complicity with 
his sinfulness, can exercise its office in the for- 
giveness of the sinner. This is the way in 
which, typically, under the Mosaic dispensa- 
tion, sinfulness or guilt was transferred to the 
animal devoted to sacrifice ; and forgiveness 
and acceptance were accorded to the party 
offering it. By this way, according to the 
Gospel, God has actually decreed to extend 
mercy unto salvation to sinful men. The 
passages which affirm this are almost innu- 
merable. The leading doctrine of the Xew 
Testament — a doctrine written so plainly upon 
almost every page that it would seem to be 
impossible to misunderstand it — is that Christ 
in assuming human nature took the place of 
the sinner, and ; by his mediatorial life and 
death, relieved him from the quality and 



110 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



the liability of sinfulness, and opened the way 
for a gracious exercise of mercy towards him. 
Thus, at the outset of his ministry, Christ was 
introduced by John the Baptist as the true 
sin-bearer of men when he was proclaimed 
" the Lamb of God which taketh away the 
sin of the world." And, in the same way, 
St. Paul sets him before us, when he says, in 
2 Cor. 5 : 21, " For he hath made him to be 
sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might 
be made the righteousness of God in him;" 
and again, in Gal. 2 : 20, " I am crucified with 
Christ : nevertheless I live ; yet not I, but 
Christ liveth in me : and the life which I now 
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son 
of God, who loved me, and gave himself 
for me." 

Now is it not clear that this latter way 
of delivering the sinner from his condition, 
through an exercise of mercy based upon a 
full satisfaction of law by a surety, commends 
itself to faith as a more rational and a more 
reliable ground of confidence than the other, or 
indeed any other which may be suggested ? 
And does not the faith which embraces it 



AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. Ill 



deserve to be called the "justifying" a<rent 
which St. Paul so emphatically affirms it to be? 
(Rom. 5:1.) For first, it exhibits God as 
"justified" or proved to be consistent and 
right in bestowing mercy upon the sinner. 
Secondly, it "justifies'* or confirms by an 
adequate warrant the hope of the sinner, and 
enables him to rejoice in the assured possession 
of this mercy. And then, thirdly, it estab- 
lishes such a connection between Christ's life 
and death, and the sinner, as ••justifies" the 
latter, or makes him righteous before the law of 
God. through the righteousness of the former, 
accredited and imputed to him. For. the 
unrighteousness which had provoked the con- 
demnation of the law has been taken away 
by Christ from the sinner, and the righteous- 
ness of Christ, which perfectly satisfies the law. 
has been communicated to him in the act of 
believing: so that, as the apostle argues (Rom. 
8 : 1). "There is therefore now no condemna- 
tion to them which are in Christ Jesus." 

And hence it is that in the death of Christ 
as a propitiation for sin faith finds its full and 
final ground of confidence. It is in this pro- 



112 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



eedure that it sees most illustriously demon- 
stated his character of the Saviour of the 
world. 

IV. 

Faith, in the form in which the Bible sets it 
forth, is an actual making use of Christ and 
his work, by the sinner, as a personal act and 
for his personal benefit. You are seeking an 
interest in the mercy of God, in order to be 
delivered from your condition of sinfulness. 
You are told in the Gospel that this deliverance 
is to be secured through the mediation of 
Christ. You turn to Christ, therefore, for the 
purpose of securing this deliverance ; and you 
must turn with a trust and an expectation as 
definite as is your purpose. Your view of 
Christ, your way of looking at him, must 
make him as real an object as your sin and 
your need of deliverance from it are known to 
be real objects. Faith is a transaction lying 
between an individual and an individual : an 
individual who on the one hand cries, u What 
must I do to be saved V and an individual who 
on the other responds, " Look unto me and be 



AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION 113 



thou saved." It is the act of giving credit by 
the former to the latter, and of trusting in and 
depending upon him for the purpose of being 
saved. The general proposition, " Christ died 
for sinners/' must be made specific and particu- 
lar. It must be put in the form " Christ died 
for me, a sinner." And then to the fact so 
affirmed the literal effect or force of a fact 
must be given. You must believe that the 
benefit of Christ's mission is as applicable to 
you, and as available for you, as though it had 
been undertaken solely for yourself. Faith 
thus makes the Saviour of the world the 
Saviour of the particular sinner. It is an act 
of appropriation — a making Christ one's own 
by a personal resort to him, and a personal 
embracing and resting upon him in distinction 
from everything else, for one's salvation. A 
moment's reflection will show you that the 
soul in its application for the mercy of God 
must depend upon something. That something 
may be some supposed merit to which it lays 
claim, or it may be some work of penance to 
which it submits, or it may be some magical 
power which it ascribes to a ceremony or 



114 



FAITH IN CHRIST 



a sacrament, or it may be some conception 
of God, . as blindly and unconditionally good. 
And such dependence in every case will be 
faith. The doctrine of the Gospel requiring 
men to exercise faith in Christ has nothing 
peculiar in it except the object which it pro- 
poses to faith. The man who sneers at this 
doctrine, and who professes to found his hope 
of salvation upon his works, still is expecting 
to be saved by faith in his works. Now faith 
in Christ only puts Christ in the place of these 
works, and looks to Christ to do for the subject 
of it what this man expects his works to do 
for him. Faith in the thing upon which we are 
depending for salvation occurs, therefore, in the 
case of any method of salvation which we 
may propose to ourselves. The man who 
adopts the Gospel method, through faith in 
Christ, is simply doing in reference to Christ 
what others who say they want no Saviour ex- 
ternal to themselves are doing in reference to 
themselves. That is, he puts faith in Christ, or 
gives credit to him as a Saviour, and sees in the 
phenomena of his life and death the ground and 
the proof of his ability to fulfill this character. 



AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION 115 

To the question " Upon what do you depend 
for the mercy of God which you hope for?" 
the answer must be given, " Upon Christ, and 
what he has done and suffered for me," as 
definitely as the man who relies for justifica- 
tion upon his own righteousness would answer, 
" Upon myself, and the good deeds I have 
done." Such a faith establishes a vital con- 
nection between the believer and Christ, such 
as may be compared to that between the 
branch and the vine (John 15 : 5), and as 
such it must actually save, because in uniting 
the sinner to Christ it actually introduces him 
to the embodied and manifested mercy of God. 

V. 

But in order that the soul may enter into 
the full apprehension of this fact, faith has 
another office to perform. It must give credit 
to the promises which are made by God, in 
the Bible, to those who believe in Christ. The 
terms upon which mercy is offered to sinful 
men, as has been stated, are fulfilled in the 
mediatorial work of Christ. Those terms are 



116 FAITH IN CHRIST 

adopted by the individual when he believes in 
Christ. Now to those who thus adopt them 
the promise of God is given in almost innumer- 
able cases and forms, that they shall be de- 
livered from condemnation, pardoned, justified, 
and saved. Faith brings the soul under the 
cover of this promise, and the soul, in the 
exercise of faith, sees itself covered by this 
promise. It not only believes that the prom- 
ise has been made, but gives effect to the 
promise, extracts from it the blessings which 
it contains, and ventures (with a boldness 
which is so child-like and natural that it feels 
that not to venture so would be an act of still 
greater boldness) to say to itself. Grod's 
promise means what it says, and I am for- 
given, accepted, and saved !" To the question 
;; Upon what do you depend for salvation ?" the 
sinner, taught by the Bible, answers. ,/; Solely 
upon Christ/ 5 To the question " Why do you 
expect salvation from depending upon Christ?" 
the sinner, taught by the Bible, answers, 
" Because God has pledged it to me by his 
promise." Faith is the giving intelligently 
and honestlv both these answers to both these 



AS COXXECTED WITH RELIGIOX. 



117 



questions ; and if the Bible be not false, such 
a faith must save the subject of it. 

" God so loved the world that he gave his 
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth 
on him should not perish, but have everlasting 
life." John 3 : 16. 

i: Christ is the end of the law for righteous- 
ness to every one that believeth." Rom. 10:4. 



CHAPTER VII. 



REGENERATION AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. 

In what I have thus far said, it may seem 
that I have made religion consist merely of 
certain mental changes and exercises. And 
you may ask, How do these verify the defini- 
tion of religion given at the outset of this 
treatise, as a form of life which, in all its par- 
ticulars of character and conduct, is pleasing 
io God? That the view of religion which I 
have been presenting does accord with this 
definition of it I will now proceed to show ; 
and the point of harmony will be found in the 
scriptural doctrine of Regeneration. It is evi- 
dent that when religion is defined as a special 
form of life, it is implied that the subject of it 
is possessed of a life which is capable of taking 
on flu's special form. ;; For every tree is known 
by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not 
gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they 
grapes." Luke 6 : 4-4. The presence of life 



REG EN ERA TIO X AS CONNECTED, ETC. 119 



is known only hy the symptoms and processes 
through which it expresses itself. When cer- 
tain symptoms and processes are observed you 
say there is life, and life of a kind adapted to 
produce these phenomena. If religion be a 
form of life, therefore, it will reveal itself 
through symptoms and processes which dem- 
onstrate in the subject of it the presence of a 
religious life. Now, the Bible teaches that 
every truly religious man is so because he is 
the recipient of a new life. "Except a man 
be born again," said Christ (John 3 : 3), "he 
cannot see the kingdom of God that is, he 
cannot be trulv religious. This being: " born 
again" is the regeneration of which I am 
speaking. And it is further said by Christ to 
be wrought by the Holy Spirit (John 3 : 5). 
Hence, it must be the result of a supernatural 
operation ; and as such it is called ( John 1 : 13) 
a being " born of God." A birth issuing from 
a divine source must communicate the kind of 
life which will, in all its manifestations of char- 
acter and conduct, be pleasing to God. But 
the Bible also teaches that these mental 
changes and exercises, which I have been 



120 



REGEXERATIOX AS COXXECTED 



explaining under the names of repentance and 
faith in Christ, are symptoms and processes 
which belong to this life, and prove the pres- 
ence of it in the person of him who exhibits 
them, The man who truly repents of his sins, 
and believes on the Lord Jesus Christ, is 
shown by these acts to have been the subject 
of this new birth. He has received a kind of 
life whose special property or law it is to please 
God. To the objection which may be raised, 
that repentance and believing, by themselves, 
do not constitute religion. I reply that they do 
something more. They prove that the man 
practicing them is the possessor of a new life, 
which must issue in that special form in which 
he will appear as one who. in all the particulars 
of his character and conduct, will be pleasing 
to God. He repents and believes because he 
is already ••born again;" and if born in this 
way. the form of his life will be in all respects 
religious. The tree having been made aood 
the fruit will be good. The religious man is 
so because he is a regenerate man ; and the 
evidence that he is a regenerate man appears 
in the repentance and faith which are the first 



WITH RELIGION. 



121 



developments of the new birth which he has 
received. This subject of regeneration, there- 
fore, has an intimate connection with religion, 
and deserves a serious consideration at the 
hands of the inquirer. 

I. 

The fact that any man is regenerated is due, 
according to the express testimony of our 
Saviour, to a power exercised upon him by 
the Holy Spirit. The same doctrine is taught 
or assumed all through the New Testament. 
The proof that this fact has occurred in any 
particular case is found, as I have said, in its 
first stage, in those symptoms and processes 
which we call repentance and faith. Repent- 
ance and faith, therefore, are due to an influ- 
ence exercised upon the soul by the Holy 
Spirit. But nothing is clearer than that re- 
pentance and faith are, and must be, personal 
states of mind ; that is, they appertain to the 
individual who entertains and exhibits them. 
When you repent and believe in Christ it is 
you who do these things, not the Holy Spirit 
or any other being doing them for you. Until 

9 



122 



REGENERATION AS CONNECTED 



it can be said of you. " he repents/' ;; he be- 
lieves/' there can be no repentance or faith in 
your case. These things must be your own 
acts as much as your sins have been your own 
acts. Now. there is no conflict between this 
statement and the one which preceded it. 
Both are true, and both are necessary to be 
known. There is no inconsistency in saying 
that an individual is brought into a penitent 
and believing state of mind, or is disposed and 
enabled to entertain and express such a state 
of mind, by an agency outside of himself, such 
as that of the Holy Spirit. For there is no 
fact in our experience more familiar than this, 
that our conditions of mind, and the tempers, 
feelings, and purposes included in them, are 
wrought within us by an influence foreign to 
ourselves. The leaf on the bough of a tree is 
not more played upon by the shifting breeze 
than the soul is by influence. The clay is not 
more literally moulded by the hand of the 
potter than the human heart is by influence. 
The power of it every one knows, for he feels 
it. and he uses it. Education, in one very im- 

7 7 %/ 

portant part of it is but the application of this 



WITH RELIGION. 



123 



power. The gospel, in "persuading" men to 
be reconciled to God, is only availing itself of 
this power. That a man should have become 
what he is, or should have been made to un- 
dergo a change from one condition of mind to 
another, through the agency of an influence 
exerted upon him by another party, is not at 
all an unreasonable proposition, and does not 
at all disturb or destroy his own personal con- 
cern in the procedure. And that the Holy 
Spirit should be such an agent, where the de- 
sign of the procedure is to influence a soul 
towards such a change of mind as is exempli- 
fied in a sinner's repenting and resorting to 
Christ as the medium of God's mercy, will not 
be deemed unreasonable or improbable by one 
who believes that God takes cognizance of the 
fact of sin in the individual, and has so far in- 
terposed to deliver that individual from his 
condition, as a sinner, as to provide a way for 
his deliverance, through the life and death of 
his eternal Son. If the gospel be a revelation 
of a definite scheme of grace, devised by God 
for the saving of sinful men, we may be sure 
that among its provisions there will be found 



124 



REGENERATION AS CONNECTED 



one which guarantees to the sinner the aid of 
such a power as that of the Holy Spirit, if this 
be necessary to give effect to that scheme. Such 
a provision, on the ground of its being a neces- 
sary one, the Bible therefore has revealed to 
us in the doctrine of regeneration. 

II. 

The term implies, of course, a new birth — 
a being born over again. Such a term applied 
to a being already born can only mean the un- 
dergoing of a change which produces the same 
kind of effect that birth produces. Birth gives 
being ; but more than this, it gives being after 
a kind, a species ; it affixes a nature to being. 
I am born— a being, a living thing ; but I am 
born, at the same time, a man — a being with a 
human nature, this nature determining my 
place and quality in the world of life. Regen- 
eration does not literally give a new being to 
the subject of it, but it gives him a new nature ; 
it makes him a different kind of being from what 
he was before. He was a sinner — a being 
whose law of life produced a form of life which 



WITH RELIGION. 



125 



was not pleasing to God. He becomes a pen- 
itent man — one who condemns and deplores 
his former form of life ; one who sees, con- 
fesses, and sorrows over his sinfulness ; one 
who feels his need of the mercy of God in 
order to be delivered from his condition of sin- 
fulness; one who is willing to submit to any 
change or sacrifice on his own part to obtain 
this mercy, and to accept it upon any terms 
which God may be pleased to annex to the 
bestowal of it ; and one who therefore, in com- 
pliance with the requisitions of the gospel, rec- 
ognizes in Christ the only medium through 
which it can be obtained, and thankfully re- 
poses upon his mediation as the ground of his 
forgiveness and acceptance by God. Now let 
it be remembered that this change is not a 
momentary paroxysm ; it is not a fit or spasm 
which may pass away and leave the party ex- 
periencing it the same kind of being that he 
was previously. Repentance and faith are 
permanent states of mind. When commenced 
in truth, they are like respiration — -they last 
as long as life lasts. When, according to the 
Bible, does a religious man cease to repent and 



126 REGENERATION AS CONNECTED 

believe in Christ? "My sin/' said David (Ps. 
51 : 3), "is ever before ine." "I live" said St. 
Paul (Gal. 2 : 20), "by the faith of the Son of 
God." Repentance and faith, therefore, con- 
stitute a new kind of being in the man who 
really experiences them, and this means a new 
nature ; and when this is given, there is, in 
effect, a new birth, a regeneration. 

III. 

The change described by such a term must 
be radical. It is more than outward reforma- 
tion, more than an assumption of a new dialect 
or a new demeanor. It is called in the Script- 
ures a " quickening," or the introduction of a 
new principle of life into the subject of it. It 
is likened to the giving of sight to the blind, 
which is more than removing a flaw from a dis- 
eased eye. In it St. Paul declares (2 Cor. 5 : 
17) "old things are passed away" — that is, 
have become extinct, or have perished; "be- 
hold, all things are become new." He affirms 
the same thing when he speaks of the " old 
man" being put off and the "new man" put 



WITH RELIGION. 



127 



on. The true man, in every case, is the being 
who feels, chooses, purposes. He is consti- 
tuted not by speech, manner, and deport- 
ment — for these may be a mere mask — but 
by the affections of the soul. When these are 
changed from old to new, the "old man" be- 
comes the " new man." Repentance and faith 
imply a change of this character ; and two con- 
clusions follow upon the occurrence of such a 
change. 

The first is that the influence bv which it is 

«/ 

wrought must be more than human culture. It 
must be a power which can give life — or, what 
is the same thing, birth — and which therefore 
must proceed from the Author of life. It must 
be what the Bible says it is, the power of the 
Holy Spirit. So David confessed when he 
prayed (Ps. 51 : 10), "Create in me a clean 
heart, 0 God, and renew a right spirit within 
me. 

The second conclusion is that the new life 
imparted in regeneration must be the opposite 
of the old one, which has been extinguished. 
As that was a sinful life — one that did not 
please God — this must be a holy life — one 



128 REGENERATION AS CONNECTED 



which aims, in all its developments and exer- 
cises, to please God. As the one was under 
the law of a sinful nature, and so was carnal, 
this, being the product of the Holy Spirit, 
must he spiritual. As the affections which 
controlled the one made self and the world 
the supreme objects of regard, the affections 
which give character to the other must be a 
supreme love to God. and delight in his service 
and favor. 

Add now to these facts the further thought 
that a change so wrought, and of such a nature, 
cannot be a mere transient mood of mind, but 
must be an abiding principle and specific type 
of life, forming, indeed, the very nature «f the 
man ; and the conviction must come with the 
force of a demonstration, that in the result to 
which, through repentance and faith, by the 
regenerating influence of the Holy Spirit the 
soul has been brought, we shall have the genu- 
ine and perfect realization of religion. For 
that result, being the communication of a new 
life by the Spirit of God. must demonstrate 
itself in the possessor by a new form of life, 
which in all its particulars of character and 



WITH RELIGIOX. 



129 



conduct shall please God; and this will be 
religion. 

IV. 

The subject of this radical change will of 
course have the highest possible evidence that 
the form of life, which is the product of it, is 
the genuine thing called religion. Being "born, 
not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor 
of the will of man, but of God" (John 1 : 13), 
he is a "son of God," an object of his favor, 
and a partaker of his nature. The question 
" Upon what evidence can the experience of 
this change be predicated ?" is, therefore, an 
all-important one ; and a remark or two may 
be proper, in the way of an answer to it. 
First, let it be noticed that a distinction is to 
be made between a consciousness of the fact 
of regeneration and a conception of the mode 
and process of regeneration. In regard to 
natural life, every man is conscious of the fact 
that he is alive, but cannot tell what life is, 
nor how he was made alive. The Saviour said 
to Nicodemus, in reply to his query, "how can 
these things be ?" — " The wind bloweth where 



130 



REGENERATION AS CONNECTED 



it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, 
but canst not tell whence it cometh, nor 
whither it goeth." The rustling of a leaf 
assures us that there is such a thing as the 
w T ind, and that it is in operation ; but who can 
explain its origin or its law of action ? The 
evidence of regeneration is therefore to be 
looked for in phenomena to be found in the 
subject of it ; not in any manifestation of 
the agency of the Holy Spirit, revealed 
to the senses or to the understanding. In 
other words, it is to be looked for in the 
effect, not in the cause, of the change. 
As has been remarked, regeneration is a 
personal matter. If it occurs at all, it 
occurs in the person of an individual. It 
appears in the making of a new man out of 
an old one. But the new man is the same 
person who was the old man, and must be 
conscious of the change he has undergone, and 
must be capable, to some degree at least, of 
affirming and defining the change. The blind 
man (John 9 : 25) could not tell how he was 
cured, nor wherein the power of Jesus to cure 
him lay, but he could say, " One thing I know, 



WITH RELIGIOX. 



131 



that, whereas I was blind, now I see." The 
evidence which proved that he had been cured 
was that he was conscious of new sensations, 
new convictions, new affections, new capacities. 
He had entered into a new sphere of being, 
and had a new part to act in the world. The 
regenerated man reasons in the same way, and 

O J 7 

may be as well satisfied of the correctness of 
his conclusions as he was. Repentance and 
faith, when truly exercised, as has been said, 
indicate a change so radical and so extensive 
as to prove that a regeneration has occurred. 
The intelligent apprehension of sin, as a fact 
in one's personal character and history ; the 
sense of the criminality of sin; the disappro- 
bation of and sorrow for it ; the turning away 
from it with the conscience and the heart; the 
desire for forgiveness and a recovery of the 
favor of God ; the resort to his mercy as the 
source of these blessings ; the recognition of 
the mediation of Christ as the ground upon 
which mercy is to be obtained; and an applica- 
tion to Christ, in faith and trust, for an interest 
in this mercy — all this, if really a matter of 
experience, demonstrates that transition from 



132 RE GENERA TION A S CONNECTED 



the old man to the new man which constitutes 
regeneration. But with the Bible as our guide 
we may verify this fact by a variety of other 
marks ; as, for instance : 

(1) A quickened moral sense, by which sin 
is detected in secret forms and under disguises ; 
especially in the region of the motives and 
dispositions ; and by which, when discovered, 
it produces, by a sort of spontaneous response, 
a feeling of pain and self-reprobation. It was 
the discovery of the force of the command 
" Thou shalt not covet," St. Paul tells us (Rom. 
7:7), that revealed to him the emptiness of 
his boasted righteousness, and destroyed his 
hope of justification on that ground. 

(2) Akin to this is a power of spiritual dis- 
cernment by which spiritual things are appre- 
hended, relished, and applied ; by which the 
Word of God is opened to the understanding, 
and clothed with authority and majesty — and 
often with light and beauty ; by which the 
offices of Christ are made clear, and the rela- 
tion between them and the individual is dis- 
closed sensibly to the soul. Thus, says the 
Apostle (1 Cor. 2 : 14), "the natural man 



WITH RELIGION. 



133 



receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God : 
for they are foolishness unto him : neither can 
he know them, because they are spiritually 
discerned." 

(3) A third mark of this change will be 
found in an altered manner of conceiving of 
and practicing prayer. It will be no longer a 
formal or mechanical exercise. It will be 
prompted by new views of God, and of the 
relation in which the party offering it stands 
to him ; and will be real and intelligent com- 
munion between the lowly human child and 
the infinite and infinitely gracious God — made 
his God and his Father in Jesus Christ. 

(4) Fourthly, holiness, or purity of heart 
and life, will be coveted and sought after for 
its own sake, and apart from any collateral ad- 
vantages to which it may lead. To be good 
and to do right will become pleasant in them- 
selves ; requiring no end beyond them, unless 
it be that of pleasing God, to make them at- 
tractive. 

(5) A habit in the soul of discriminating 
between God and the w 7 orld, so that the w T ill 
of the former shall take precedence over the 



134 REGENERATION AS CONNECTED 



will of the latter as a guide ; and the approval 
of the former, rather than that of the latter, 
shall be aimed at as the supreme end in the 
whole ordering of the individual's life. 

(6) Love to Christ necessarily belongs to a 
regenerated nature. " If any man love not 
the Lord Jesus Christ/' says St. Paul (1 Cor. 
16 : 22), "let him be Anathema, Maranatha." 
" If ye love me," is the familiar formula by 
which the Saviour assumes, in all his teachings, 
that his disciples will love him. The indica- 
tions of this love are not to be confined to 
emotional frames and excited sensibilities. 
These are, in the nature of things, exceptional. 
They are to be looked for, rather, in such dem- 
onstrations as can be stable and permanent ; 
as the keeping of the commandments of Christ, 
patient continuance in well-doing, complacency 
in and meditation upon Christ, gratitude to him, 
delight in his ordinances, zeal for his glory, and 
a readiness to submit to self-denial in order to 
please and serve him. 

(7) " We know that we have passed from 
death unto life," says St. John (1 John 3 : 14), 
" because we love the brethren." The love of 



WITH RELIGION. 



135 



those who belong to Christ follows naturally 
upon love to Christ, and is significant as a mark 
of a regenerate state. Men exhibit their kind 
of life by the kind of people with whom they 
sympathize and affiliate. Fellowship with un- 
believers cannot be the element in which a be- 
liever will choose to subsist. Accord, kinship 
with the household of God, is the fraternal 
spirit in regard to man, and the filial spirit in 
regard to God. 

(8) The last characteristic that need be noted 
here is a change in the use of life, or in the 
principle which determines the use of life. 
" Ye are not your own : ye are bought with a 
price," is what the Scriptures say (1 Cor. 6:19) 
of the attitude and function of the regenerate 
man. Christ is Master and Lord to his dis- 
ciples, and their one comprehensive rule is to 
" follow" him; to "occupy," in the employ- 
ment of their talents, till he come. Self is 
crucified with Christ; and henceforth, to the 
believer, life is a consecrated trust and steward- 
ship. 

Such phenomena will infallibly attest the 
reality of such a change as is implied in regen- 



136 REGENERATION AS CONNECTED, ETC. 



eration. Those here indicated are types of a 
large class. All may not be recognized in a 
particular subject at the same time ; but some 
of them will certainly appear, as expressions 
of the life of the new creature in Christ Jesus. 

"As many as are led by the Spirit of God, 
they are the sons of God." Rom. 8 : 14. 

" The Spirit itself beareth witness with our 
spirit that we are the children of God." Rom. 
8 : 16. 

"A new heart also will I give you, and a 
new spirit will I put within you ; and I will 
take away the stony heart out of your flesh, 
and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I 
will put my Spirit within you, and cause you 
to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my 
judgments, and do them." Ezek. 36 : 26, 27. 

" If ye then, being evil, know how to give 
good gifts unto your children ; how much more 
shall your heavenly Father give the Holy 
Spirit to them that ask him?" Luke 11 : 13. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



PROFESSION AS CONNECTED WITH RELIGION. 

The view of religion which has been given 
in the previous chapters represents it as an in- 
ternal work, manifesting itself by a special 
form of life in the subject of it. The term 
"confessing Christ/' which is used in the Bible 
as the equivalent of an adoption of religion, 
necessarily includes the experience of this in- 
ternal work. "Without this, your i; confessing 
Christ." in words or by symbols, would be a 
mere form or mockery. There must be re- 
ligion in the sense of it which I have pre- 
sented, before there can be a church or a 
church-member. An association of men, or an 
individual, destitute of religion, is no more en- 
titled to be called a church, or a church-mem- 
ber, than a marble statue or a wooden autom- 
aton is to be called a human being. A formal 
avowal of religion, such as is made by a unit- 
ing with the visible church, is therefore not to 

10 



138 PROFESSION AS CONNECTED 

be confounded with religion. This mistake is 
sometimes made. The idea seems, at least, to 
be sometimes entertained that the way to be- 
come religious is to attach one's self to the 
church . Let it be remembered that religion is 
a transaction between the particular soul and 
God ; a transaction in which the church can 
primarily or directly take no part. But when 
this transaction has been really concluded, and 
upon good grounds you can affirm of yourself 
that you are a religious man, it is your duty, 
where the thing is not impracticable, to avow 
your religion by uniting yourself to the visible 
church. " Confessing Christ" includes in it, 
also, this mode of asserting the repentance and 
faith by which, as an internal work, you have 
been demonstrated to be a regenerated person. 
The obligation to make a profession of your 
religion in this way is proved by such consid- 
erations as these : 

I. 

The institution by God of a visible church, 
consisting of religious people, is an intimation 
by him that all religious people should be at- 



WITH RELIGION. 



139 



tachecl to that church. Now. under the Old 
Testament dispensation, a church appears, un- 
doubtedly, under a risible and organized form. 
It was co-extensive with the circumcised de- 
scendants of Abraham, with whom and his 
seed God had entered into covenant. The 
facts of birth, and an external compliance with 
certain regulations and rites, made the Israel- 
ite, formally, a member of the church. All 
who were thus formally members, however, 
did not belong to the real body of God's chil- 
dren ; for. as St. Paul declares (Rom. 9 : 6. 7), 
'•they are not all Israel which are of Israel : 
neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, 
are they all children.' 5 That is, the mere fact 
of natural descent did not make the essentially 
religious man. But clearly, this fact that mere 
membership in the visible church did not neces- 
sarily constitute a person a religious man did 
not disturb the obligation of any really relig- 
ious man to become a member of the visible 
church. In theory, all who were associated in 
this visible church ought to have been religious 
men. Pre-eminently, therefore, the man who 
was really religious would find his proper home 



140 



PROFESSION AS COXXECTED 



and habitation there. The "kingdom of God/' 
so far as then developed, was realized in that 
visible church ; and every genuine child of the 
kingdom was bound to place himself under the 
bounds and badges by which the kingdom was 
distinguished from the world. 

II. 

The New Testament proclaims and empha- 
sizes the fact that this "kingdom of God" is 
continued without intermission in the world, 
and that it is advanced to its complete and 
final form. The outward peculiarities under 
which it appeared in the Jewish church, as a 
national and hereditary institution, were abol- 
ished by Christ, and the spiritual feature, the 
essential religiousness of the regenerate man, 
was made the condition of and the title to 
membership in it. Henceforth there was to 
be no difference between Jew and Gentile, be- 
tween circumcision and uncircumcision ; but 
all who were born of the Spirit, all who con- 
stituted the body of true believers in Christ, 
were to be accredited as members of the " king- 
dom of God." The church, modified in accord- 



WITH RELIGION, 



141 



ance with this change, was continued in the 
world together with this kingdom. It was 
continued in a visible and organized form ; for 
in this form Christ laid the foundation of it in 
the society of his apostles, and the super- 
structure of it was reared by their hands in 
the societies of believers whom they gathered 
together in their evangelistic missions. As the 
"kingdom of God" spread from land to land, 
and from city to city, the fact of its diffusion 
is made manifest by the appearance of such 
visible and organized communities as the 
" Church at Antioch," the Church at Ephe- 
sus/' the " Church at Corinth/' and so on. In 
all such societies government was instituted by 
the ordination of presbyters or elders (Acts 
14 : 23), and probably deacons (Phil. 1:1). 
In one of such societies or churches, wherever 
practicable, it is fair to conclude every par- 
ticular believer was expected to be enrolled. 

III. 

The obligation to observe the two ordinances 
of baptism and the Lord's Supper, which cer- 
tainly rests upon all believers, seems to carry 



142 



PROFESSION AS CONNECTED 



with it an obligation on the part of each be- 
liever to identify himself with the visible 
church. Obviously, the imposition of this 
observance by Christ upon his followers for- 
bids any man to say. "Between myself and 
God — where the matter lies — I am satisfied 
that I am religious ; therefore I have no need 
of such supplementary attestations of my relig- 
iousness as are to be found in the practice of 
baptism or the Lord's Supper." For if these 
sacraments have been ordained by Christ as 
things to be observed by his disciples, every 
disciple needs to observe them, just as he 
needs to obey any other command of his Lord. 
Now the evidence that these things have been 

o 

enjoined upon his disciples is so clear and com- 
plete as to preclude all question. " Go ye 
and teach" — that is. make disciples of — "all 
nations." said Christ in his last commission to 
his apostles. " baptizing them in the name of 
the Father, and of the Son. and of the Holy 
Ghost : teaching them to observe all things what- 
soever I have commanded you" (Matt. 38 : 19. 
20). As the apostles were commanded to ad- 
minister baptism, surely, therefore, every dis- 



WITH RELIGIOX. 



143 



ciple is commanded to receive baptism. And 
so, at the institution of the last Supper, the 
Lord says, "This do in remembrance of me" 
(Luke 22 : 19) — a command which evidently 
implies that a doing of what Jesus was then 
doing would continue to be done, at least by 
these apostles, indefinitely in the future. 
That the command was understood to embrace 
all the succession of believers till the end of 
time is shown by the general references to 
the observance of this ordinance in the early 
churches to be found in the book of Acts ; and 
especially by the account of the institution of 
it and the proper mode of observing it given 
by St. Paul to the Corinthian Church in 1 
Cor. 11. It is here seen that an apostle who 
was not one of the original party to whom the 
command " this do," etc., was given, considers 
himself bound by it, and that, in teaching their 
duty to a body of Gentile Christians living at 
the distance of more than twenty-five years 
from the time of the issuance of the command, 
he considers them bound by it. The sense of 
the church in all ages that this command is 
universal and perpetual in its application can- 



144 



PROFESSION AS COXXECTED 



not be a misconception. But observe now that 
both of these ordinances include in their sianifi- 
cance all that is signified bv the act of uniting 
with the visible church ; for by the one — bap- 
tism — the recipient formally and publicly takes 
a position in that special class of persons known 
as believers in Christ ; and by the other — the 
Lord's Supper — the participant formally and 
publicly continues to maintain and assert his 
position as one of this special class of persons. 
An organized and a visible societv. in which 
each particular believer can be accredited as a 
membei\ is presupposed in the fact that the 
Lord has imposed such ordinances upon his 
followers. These ordinances do not give the 
grace of regeneration, or make men religious, 
as is sometimes taught ; but the observance of 
them clearly belongs to the modes by which 
men are required to express the fact that they 
are regenerate or religious. You cannot iiea 1 - 
lect or repudiate them without putting in 
question the genuineness of your claim to be 
a regenerate or religious mam as much as you 
would do by deliberately violating any other 
law of the kingdom of God. 



WITH RELIGION. 



145 



IV. 

The duties which belong to a religious life 
are, many of them, such as require that be- 
lievers should be associated in the form of a 
visible and organized church, and that each 
individual believer should be incorporated with 
this church. For instance, that sort of testi- 
mony which the people of God are expected 
to offer to the notice of the world of the exist- 
ence of a "kingdom of God" in it can hardly 
be efficiently rendered without some such sens- 
ible demonstration of the distinction between 
this " kingdom" and the world as is given in a 
visible and organized church. " Te are the light 
of the world/' said Jesus to his disciples (Matt. 
5 : 14) — speaking of them, apparently, in their 
collective capacity ; but this character, in a col- 
lective capacity, could only be realized by the 
combination of the lights which separate be- 
lievers had to bestow. Each believer must 
help to make this general light by throwing 
into it his particle of light, however minute. 
" Men do not light a candle and put it under 
a bushel, but on a candlestick ; and it giveth 



146 



PROFESSION AS COXXECTED 



light unto all that are in the house." A blaze 
of illumination is needed in order to make men 
know that the "kingdom of God" is among 
them ; and this can never be produced by can- 
dles secreted under bushels, but only when 
these are placed in open and public position, 
as on candlesticks, and their rays concentrated 
in one common focal light. 

In like manner, the duty of religious men to 
practice and maintain the worship of God as a 
positive institution in the world, which God 
clearly demands of them (John 4 : 23), re- 
quires a union of their efforts and services in 
this respect, which implies such an association 
of individuals and such an orderly economy as 
we find in the visible Church. As God was to 
be worshipped in the "great congregation" 
under the old dispensation, so, for the same 
purpose, under the new, believers are admon- 
ished " not to forsake the assembling of them- 
selves together, as the manner of some is." 
Heb. 10 : 25. 

So the special charge laid upon believers 
collectively, to preach the gospel to every 
creature, and to extend the " kingdom of God" 



WITH RELIGION. 



147 



throughout the world, demands that unity of 
counsel and concert of action which are to be 
secured only through the medium of a visible 
and organized church. The nations of the 
earth are to be conquered to God through 
human agents ; and this can never be done till 
all believers are joined together, with the com- 
pactness and unanimity of an army, in the 
work. 

The facilities afforded by the organization of 
a church, to individual Christians, in those 
charitable and pious labors in which, like their 
Master, they are to engage, is another argu- 
ment for the association of individuals in a 
church capacity. And further, the cultivation 
of brotherly love, and efforts for mutual en- 
couragement and edification, which are enjoined 
upon all the children of God, point as a neces- 
sity to the sacred family-relationship and com- 
munion which are realized in the Church. 

V. 

To these considerations I would add one 
more of a peculiarly personal character. The 



148 



PROFESSION AS CONNECTED 



joy which the believer is authorized to expect 
from his religion depends very much upon that 
sensible assertion of his fellowship with Christ 
which he makes in a literal profession of his 
faith. If it were true, as is often affirmed, that 
a man can be as good a Christian out of the 
visible church as in it, it would still be true, 
I think from a long course of observation, that 
he cannot be as happy a Christian out of the 
visible church as in it. The reasons which are 
usually assigned for declining a church-con- 
nection are certainly not such as show in the 
persons offering them those motives and senti- 
ments which are akin to religious peace and 
satisfaction. There is ordinarily a quarrel, at 
some point, which lies at the foundation of this 
exclusiveness ; and a quarrel of any kind is 
unfriendly to enjoyment. A want of confi- 
dence, or an absence of sympathy, in any po- 
sition, is inconsistent with true rest of soul. 
Besides, the out-speaking of love is the natural 
expression of it, and adds to the sense of it, 
and to the sense of the sweetness of it. Love 
to Christ, like the waters gushing from a fount- 
ain, will gladly pour itself out through every 



WITH RELIGION. 



149 



channel ; and will widen its volume as it mul- 
tiplies its channels. The Ethiopian nobleman 
of whom' we read (Acts 8 : 27) had believed 
in Christ on the preaching of Philip. But in- 
stead of being satisfied with the internal work 
which had been wrought in his heart, no sooner 
did the opportunity to profess his faith in a 
legitimate way present itself, than he cries 
with eas:er delight, " See, here is water ! What 
doth hinder me to be baptized ?" And when 
the solemn rite of profession was concluded, 
we have the significant record, "he went on 
his way rejoicing." He had joined no particular 
or local church, for none such was accessible to 
him; but by the prescribed form he had iden- 
tified himself with the visible Church of Christ; 
he had palpably planted himself on Christian 
ground ; he had put his secret convictions into 
an articulate utterance, and with his inward 
consciousness of a new life, confirmed by this 
outward attestation of it, he pursued his way 
with a new song on his lips and a new joy in 
his heart. The solitary pilgrim who will walk 
in a way of his own, and asks no comfort from 
Christian companionship, and no aid from the 



150 PROFESSIOX AS CONNECTED, ETC. 



signs and seals which Grod has affixed to his 
covenant with his people, I am sure, as a gen- 
eral thing, at least, carries no such spirit with 
him on his journey towards heaven. 

Religion therefore, we may conclude, though 
carefully to be distinguished from mere mem- 
bership in the church, beyond a doubt includes 
among the demonstrations of it, warranted by 
the Bible, a free and solemn confession of 
Christ, by a public connection of the individual 
believer with the visible church which Christ 
has instituted, which he calls his " body," and 
over which he presides as the glorified Head. 

" For by one Spirit are we all baptized into 
one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles ; 
whether we be bond or free." 1 Cor. 12 : 13. 

"Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priest- 
hood, a holy nation, a peculiar people ; that ye 
should shew forth the praises of him who hath 
called you out of darkness into his marvellous 
light." 1 Peter 2:9. 

" And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, 
and come to Zion with songs and everlasting 
joy upon their heads." Isa. 35 : 10. 



CHAPTER IX. 



PRACTICAL COUNSELS AND CAUTIONS IN REFERENCE 
TO RELIGION. 

The person who has by an honest effort 
passed from the first point of spiritual ex- 
perience indicated in the foregoing remarks 
to the result noticed in the last chapter may, 
in the Bible sense of the term, be called a 
religious man. The purpose which the author 
has had in view in the preparation of this 
treatise might therefore be said to have here 
reached its completion. But he is aware that 
in an inquiry so critical as that which concerns 
the nature of true religion and the method of 
acquiring it, many incidental questions may be 
started or difficulties suggested, which may 
embarrass a mind earnestly engaged in the 
inquiry, and may impede the way to a satis- 
factory conclusion. These questions and dif- 
ficulties will take so many shapes, according 
to the different tempers and habits of individ- 



152 PRACTICAL COUNSELS AND CAUTIONS 

uals, that many of them must be left to be 
dealt with by private counsels on the part of 
judicious and experienced friends ; but some 
of them are sufficiently common to be antic- 
ipated, and a few remarks may therefore prop- 
erly be added in the hope of offering some 
solution of them. 

I. 

The nature of religion, as I have been pre- 
senting it, involves, as we have seen, conspic- 
uously the agency of certain supernatural 
elements. The religious man becomes so 
through something done for him by Christ his 
Divine Redeemer, and something done in him 
by the Holy Spirit his Divine Regenerator. 
Now this view of the matter may seem to you 
to have the effect of removing religion outside 
of the field of practical effort on your part. In 
other matters of study or achievement you 
may know what to do, and may be prompt to 
do it. But here you are bewildered, perhaps 
disheartened, by finding yourself acting upon 
such exceptional and mysterious ground. You 
may be tempted even to conclude that nothing 



IN REFEREXCE TO RELIGION 



153 



is to be done by you but wait till some extra- 
ordinary influence, in some inexplicable way. 
shall, by a happy violence, transport you out 
of your present position into that of a Christian. 

Now it ought to be remembered that if there 
is a supernatural department in religion there 
is also, and must be. a natural one. What is 
done for you by Christ and in you by the 
Holy Spirit, is still done for and in you^ as you 
are naturally constituted and endowed. And 
such capacity for effort as belongs to you 
naturally is not superseded by the agency 
ascribed to Christ and the Holy Spirit in the 
matter of religion. The doctrine of such an 
agency rather is intended to guide and aid 
your personal effort. Your inability in regard 
to such processes as are wrought for and in 
you by Christ and the Holy Spirit — that is, 
deliverance from the guilt of sin and the com- 
munication of a new nature — is altogether con- 
sistent with an ability to employ the powers 
which you possess as a rational being. The 
Bible assigns to man in the matter of religion 
a part precisely analogous, as far as it goes, to 

that which he has to perform in other matters, 

ji 



154 PRACTICAL CAUTIONS AND COUNSELS 

which appeal to him as a rational being. Thus 
he is required and expected to " consider his 
ways/' to " search the Scriptures/' to seek 
knowledge, to reflect, to appreciate facts and 
act in view of them, to choose, to will, to 
decide according to conviction, just as he does 
in other cases. When the question is asked 
you, " What shall it profit a man if he gain 
the whole world and lose his own soul ?" it is 
implied that you can make an answer to it 
intelligently and with a becoming sense of the 
terms used in it. The proposition, "the wages 
of sin is death," is one which makes an appeal 
to your common sense, and which your com- 
mon sense, if you will let it act, cannot help 
appreciating. Such statements call for the 
exercise of the same faculties which are re- 
sorted to and depended upon by you in the 
prosecution of any species of worldly business. 
The supernatural elements of Christianity do 
not place in abeyance your natural powers, nor 
absolve you from the obligation to use them, 
and will be found upon experiment to offer 
you only the assistance you need and at the 
time when you need it, in the important in- 
quiry after religion. The command of the 



IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION. 



155 



gospel is uniformly " Come and " come " 
means " begin to move, and move now." The 
Saviour who during his earthly ministry was 
continually crying, " Come unto me/' had no 
word of excuse to offer for those who remained 
aloof from him, on the ground of embarrass- 
ments created by his own work or that of the 
Holy Spirit, but says to them distinctly, "Ye 
will not come to me that ye might have life." 
The traveller who finds himself benighted in a 
wild desert, hungry and chilled, might as well 
refuse the invitation extended to him by some 
hospitable dweller in the region, who stands 
with his door open calling to him to come in 
and enjoy warmth and refreshment, because he 
cannot understand how a human habitation 
could have been erected in such a place or 
how fuel and provision could have been con- 
veyed to it. The common sense which guides 
him in other cases, where his safety or interest 
is concerned, would bid him drop such spec- 
ulations and hasten to the offered rest. 

II. 

Perplexity sometimes — very frequently, I 
have reason to suspect — grows out of miscon- 



156 



PRACTICAL CAUTIONS AND COUNSELS 



ceptions in regard to the nature of faith in 
Christ, or the way in which faith operates in 
embracing Christ. Figurative expressions are 
used in the Bible, find used, we may say, 
necessarily in a book addressed to men. These 
expressions are borrowed from the acts of the 
body; such as, "laying hold of" or "looking 
to" an object, "fleeing to" a refuge, "taking 
the water of life," and so on. Some special 
exercises of the soul, something anomalous in 
its procedure which may bear an analogy to 
these acts, is supposed to be necessary. Now, 
these terms all signify simply a hearty and in- 
telligent dependence upon Christ for the mercy 
of God, which the sinner needs and desires. 
It is the same kind of dependence which he is 
practicing in other matters. It is evident that 
he must have something to depend upon, as a 
ground upon which to expect this mercy of 
God. That something may be one of various 
things. Whatever it is, the confidence reposed 
in it will be faith. The right thing to put in 
this place of dependence, the Bible says, is 
Christ. Let the troubled doubter ask himself, 
then, " What do I put in this place, or upon 
what do I depend for my acceptance with God ? 



IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION. 



Vol 



Is it my own righteousness ? Is it the merit 
of my prayers or religious observances ? Is it 
the credit of quitting some evil practice ? Or 
is it the vows I have made as to future 
well-doing?" If he is in earnest in his pursuit 
of religion, he will say to these questions, 
promptly, "No." Then let him ask. "Is it 
Christ — Christ and nothing else ?" If the an- 
swer to this question arises just as promptly, 
"Yes," he has the faith of the gospel, though 
it be in its character just as simple as any 
other act of faith. And if he will onlv follow 
up this faith with the further exercise of it, 
which gives credit to the promises of pardon 
and justification, made so frequently in the 
Bible to those who do thus depend upon Christ, 
he may, and will, receive into his soul the com- 
forting assurance that he is a pardoned and 
justified man. He will have " tasted that the 
Lord is gracious," and will need to trouble 
himself no more about the nature of the pro- 
cess. 

III. 

The pursuit of religion is sometimes embar- 
rassed by the disposition to make the experi- 



158 PRACTICAL CAUTIONS AND COUNSELS 

ence of other persons the guide and test of 
that required of the individual. The question, 
What are repentance and faith as actual exer- 
cises of the soul ? is one which it is natural for 
the inquirer to ask. And the answer is per- 
haps quite as naturally sought for in the testi- 
mony of living Christian friends, or in that of 
the biographies of eminent departed saints. 
Coincidence with the phenomena detailed in 
these cases is assumed to be essential, and the 
want of it becomes a source of discouragement. 
This assumption is an error. With the variety 
which is known to exist in the temperaments 
and circumstances of different individuals, it 
would be unreasonable to expect that the effect 
of religious truth would be identical in all cases. 
The Bible, with that wisdom which character- 
izes all the terms and provisions which it has 
annexed to salvation, does not require this 
uniformity of experience. It prescribes no in- 
flexible way by which the sinner is to pass into 
the characters of the penitent and the believer. 
One thing is proposed as fundamental, and that 
is — Grod's method of justification through his 
grace bestowed upon men, solely on the ground 
of the mediatorial work of Christ. This must 



IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION. 159 

be accepted and relied upon by every one who 
receives the mercy of God. This is done when- 
ever repentance and faith can be said to have 
been intelligently and sincerely practiced by the 
soul. The fervor of feeling which may ac- 
company these exercises is incidental rather 
than essential. It may vary indefinitely, in 
entire consistency with genuineness in them. 
If they are based upon correct Scriptural views 
of sin and guilt, and of Christ and his work ; 
and if they are expressions of an honest con- 
viction, desire, and purpose, they have verified 
what is demanded by the Bible. And this is 
the authentic arbiter in the case. The manner 
in which one man is affected is no index of 
the manner in which another is to be affected. 
Repentance in one subject of it may be accom- 
panied with an intense and protracted distress ; 
and the discovery of the freeness and fullness 
of mercy offered in Christ, in faith, may flood 
the soul with a delight amounting to rapture. 
But such extremes of emotion are not, any- 
where in the Bible, said to be indispensable to 
the reality of repentance and faith. Rather, 
the instances of them given in the Bible are 
marked by calmness and gravity. To a right 



160 PRACTICAL CAUTIONS AND COUNSELS 

repentance and a true faith the promises of the 
gospel are addressed ; and repentance will be 
right, and faith will be true, when they accord 
with the definitions of them given in the Bible, 
whether they agree or not with w T hat others 
may have to relate, or what may have been 
recorded of them in books, concerning their 
own particular experience. 

IV. 

The simplicity with which religion should 
be sought by the inquirer is sometimes dis- 
turbed by a premature occupation of the mind 
with questions touching church membership 
and its obligations. As has been remarked in 
a previous chapter, religion is strictly a trans- 
action between the individual soul and God. 
The need of religion, which lies in the soul, 
conducts it to God. The relief which meets 
that need comes directly to the soul from God. 
The only intermediate object which can be 
admitted to the thought is Christ, who is the 
channel through whom both the need must be 
presented and the relief communicated. To 
introduce the Church to the consideration of a 



IN REFEREXCE TO RELIGIOX. 



161 



person engaged in the pursuit of religion is to 
embarrass him in that pursuit, if not to divert 
him from it. * The Church does not properly 
come into view until after that pursuit has 
been successfully concluded. Of course the 
Church is not to be thought of as a necessary 
medium of access to God. That would be to 
put it in the place of Christ, and invest it with 
the office of a saviour. To entertain this idea 
is to turn away from the pursuit of religion 
altogether. Or, as often happens, to indulge 
the mind in forecasting the solemn responsibil- 
ities of church membership, and in conjuring 
up the perils which may possibly arise from 
your inability to meet those responsibilities, is 
to admit into the problem you are considering 
a factor which is entirely foreign to it, and to 
encumber the pursuit of religion with difficul- 
ties which are unreasonable and irrelevant. 
What you have to do now is to become a 
religious man — to obtain the forgiveness of 
sin, a regenerate heart, and reconciliation with 
God. The time to consider the duty of as- 
suming church membership, with its responsi- 
bilities and perils, will come only when these 
results have been attained ; and when that 



162 PRACTICAL CAUTIONS AND COUNSELS 

time comes, the light which may be needed to 
determine the question of duty may be con- 
fidently expected. Your business as an in- 
quirer is to see that your feet are planted 
certainly in the way of God, and that will 
lead you by an easy progress into the house 
of God. Reversing this order, and putting 
the house of God between you and the way 
of God, will only be throwing an impediment 
in your pursuit of religion. The thief on the 
cross had the promise from the highest author- 
ity of being admitted to Paradise in a few 
short hours. The thought of the Church, or 
of a formal connection with it, did not enter 
into his mind ; nor was there any allusion to 
it in the Saviour's answer to his prayer. Re- 
ligion with him in his extremity was a simple 
pursuit of mercy from God, through the me- 
diation of Christ ; and it was successful. Suc- 
cess in every case requires that there should 
be a pursuit of the same object, and the same 
simplicity in that pursuit. 

V. 

The seeker after religion is sometimes hin- 
dered in his effort by an undue devotion to 



IN REFER EXCE TO RELIGIOX. 



163 



the study of abstruse doctrines, or by an ex- 
cessive attention to the operations and frames 
of his own mind, or to what is called intro- 
spection. In preference to these methods of 
gaining light, the Bible recommends the use of 
prayer. " The things that are freely given to 
us of God," says St. Paul (1 Cor. 2 : 12), we 
are to know through the aid of " the Spirit 
which is of God." Now the aid of this " Spirit 
which is of God " is to be sought from God 
through prayer; and the necessity of prayer 
as a principal means of acquiring religion must 
be recognized by the inquirer. In the nature 
of the case the use of prayer is demanded of 
him. Religion, as we have seen, begins with 
a sense of the need of God's mercy and with 
a desire for it in the soul of a sinner. That 
desire would be a nominal, not a real, thing, if 
it did not report itself to God — its appropriate 
object. Spoken or unspoken, the so reporting 
of itself is prayer. But nature asks the aid 
of speech in reporting its desires ; and the 
desire of the sinner needs this aid in express- 
ing itself. Spoken prayer gives distinctness, 
and even force, to the desire which it reveals. 
It helps the party resorting to it to realize 



164 PRACTICAL CAUTIONS AND COUNSELS 

better that he is carrying his desire to the 
Being to whom it must be presented in order 
to be relieved. It has special promises made 
to it, and is an instituted method of approach- 
ing God. And on these accounts it is to be 
commended to the inquirer as a way of gaining 
sensible and efficacious access to God, and to 
" the things that are freely given to us" of 
him — more direct than any which is afforded 
by the merely intellectual exercises of study, 
reflection, or speculation. Prayer, truly of- 
fered, implies the presence of God with the 
suppliant. The presence of God is the pres- 
ence of the source from which mercy must 
come to the soul. In that presence, so near 
the fountain of salvation, it is to be expected 
the hand of faith will most easily and certainly 
find and grasp the blessing sought. The re- 
sponse, " Go iu peace ; thy sins be forgiven 
thee," comes perhaps most frequently as an 
answer to prayer. 

VI. 

The disposition to look for the promised aid 
of the Holy Spirit under extraordinary forms 
may conceal from the inquirer the actual forms 



IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION. 



165 



under which that aid has been given. The 
absence of such extraordinary forms may cause 
a disappointment which leads to discourage- 
ment; whereas the doctrine of the Holy Spir- 
it's work, when properly understood and ap- 
plied, is adapted to be an eminent source of 
encouragement to the seeker after religion. — 
for it assures him that in every good disposi- 
tion, every right purpose, every spiritual ap- 
prehension, of which he is conscious, he is 
already experiencing the aid of this divine 
agent. The desire for grace, or the impulse 
which prompts him to seek grace, is a proof 
that grace has already been bestowed. While 
the prayer for the Holy Spirit's aid is going 
up, the Holy Spirit, with his gracious power, 
is already present, inspiring the prayer. And 
grace bestowed is an earnest and pledge of 
more grace ready to be bestowed, according to 
the recipient's need. Every struggling aspi- 
ration of the soul after Christ is a sign that 
Christ is already calling the soul to himself. 
The blind Bartimseus (Mark 10:46), while 
crying to Jesus, " Thou Son of David, have 
mercy on me," finds himself already called of 
Jesus ; and as his step drew nearer, and his 



166 PRACTICAL CAUTIONS AND COUNSELS 

prayer became more earnest, he learns that all 
was preparatory to the final message of grace : 
" Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole." 

A solemn inference from this doctrine ought 
not to be overlooked. To stop short of this 
final grace; to relinquish, from any cause, the 
effort to obtain it; to "look back" after you 
have been led to "put your hand to the 
plough/' — is not only to prove yourself unfit 
for the kingdom of God, but it is to be guilty 
of discrediting the grace already vouchsafed to 
you, and of quenching the influences of the 
Holy Spirit. 

VII. 

One caution more needs to be given in regard 
to the cherishing of doubts as to his regenera- 
tion and acceptance with God by the inquirer. 
When, upon fair scriptural grounds, you can 
claim to have repented and believed in Christ, 
doubting is both an unreasonable and an inex- 
cusable state of mind. It is the holding back 
of your assent from a conclusion which, God 
himself has declared, follows upon these acts. 
It is not a mark of humility, as it is often sup- 
posed to be. That would make you magnify 



IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION. 



167 



the grace of God, and readily accept of his 
mercy. It is rather a mark of a defective 
faith — a faith which still requires something 
in the man himself to supplement and com- 
plete the promise of God. It is a faith which 
fears to lean except upon a staff which it holds 
in its own hands. Such faith does not please 
God ; it does not glorify hini, because it can- 
not venture, with an entire confidence, upon 
his simple word. The faith of the gospel is 
trust — trust in Christ; and trust in Christ is 
a going out of self to Christ to do for you 
what you can no longer do for yourself. The 
effect which would follow if you had a power 
of your own to resort to must follow from your 
resort to a power which you put in the place 
of your own. Faith in Christ secures and 
makes certain salvation — just as your own 
agency would if you could employ it. The 
refusal to accept this conclusion, and to draw 
from the promise of salvation the salvation 
which it offers, is as inconsistent and as unjust 
as it would have been for the blind man to 
whom Jesus had said "Receive thy sight'' to 
stand with his eyelids closed, groping in the 
dark and mourning over his wretchedness, 



168 



PRACTICAL CAUTIONS, ETC. 



when he was all the while a healed man, and 
had only to say to himself, " I am what Jesus 
says he has made me/' to realize the gracious 
miracle which had been wrought in his behalf, 
and to expatiate in the rapture of the new 
sense which had been given him. The sinner 
who has truly gone to Christ for life must 
throw aside the last vestige of unbelief, and 
with an humble courage affirm to himself at 
once, upon the authority of Christ's word, that 
he is the actual possessor of the life which 
Christ has to bestow. By such a confidence 
God is honored, while the doubter only im- 
pugns his veracity and limits his grace. And 
in the exercise of such a confidence the believer 
realizes that religion, as a present boon, is what 
the Bible declares it to be — a " receiving the 
end of his faith, even the salvation of his soul." 

In the attainment of this happy result may 
it be the lot of all the readers of this little 
volume to share, and, in the final and perfect 
consummation of it, to experience the blessed- 
ness of the Saviour's promise : 

" Whosoever shall confess me before men, 
him will i confess also before my father 
which is in heaven." 



